We have so many choices that it's only always our fault if we're malcontent.

Fun has to do with habitual activities but then also terrifically novel or unusual ones. It works as a sort of strange milkshake of those concepts.

The problem with fun is we really don't know what fun means at all.

For me, what fun means is finding novelty in the suffocating familiarity of ordinary life.

If you start the day not really expecting substantial change, but anticipating some small new revelation or some small alteration, then over time you're able to find them in more places.

I think this dichotomy or opposition between work and play, between leisure and serious stuff, is definitely a bad way of thinking about the useful insights that play provides.

Play is this process of operating the world, of manipulating things. It's related to experimentation, and it's related to pleasure, but not defined by it.

It's not even that finding laundry pleasurable or delightful should be our goal rather than finding television delightful. It's that both laundry and television can be delightful.

The whole idea of play is in finding, acknowledging, and then working with the natural constraints and limitations that you find in the world.

There's just an enormous vast universe of possible intrigue out there and why not pay attention to it? Because then you're not burdened with trying to find that meaning in yourself all the time.

God will not speak to me and tell me to mow my lawn today.

the late afternoon sunlight, warm as oil, sweet as childhood ...

In saving Tamlin, I was to damn myself.

So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.

For this I would be damned forever. For this I would have given up everything.

Some people think self-employment is risky, but the real risk lies in deriving your security from an external source.

One of the first obligations of art is to make all useful things beautiful.

In the many times I have seen Hillary [Clinton] speak, she never fails to dazzle audiences by speaking in paragraphs, without notes.

If you die, I will bury you in the sandhills with all the other runners.

I sank back in the gray, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn't stir.

States, like men, have their growth, their manhood, their decrepitude, their decay.