Playful Quotes (page 172)
There is one kind of laugh that I always did recommend; it looks out of the eye first with a merry twinkle, then it creeps down on its hands and knees and plays around the mouth like a pretty moth around the blaze of a candle, then it steals over into the dimples of the cheeks and rides around in those whirlpools for a while, then it lights up the whole face like the mellow bloom on a damask rose, then it swims up on the air, with a peal as clear and as happy as a dinner-bell, then it goes...
Josh Billings
Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven-a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anti-climax.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Lie there panning, looking, all ribs and elbows and dilated eyes. The awake floor is littered with gear and dirty clothes, blond hardwood with sealed seams, two throw-rugs, the bare waxed wood shiny in the windows' snowlight, the floor neutral, faceless, you cannot see any face in the floor, awake, lying there, faceless, blank, dilated, playing beam over floor again and again, not sure all night forever unsure you're not missing something that's right there: you lie there, awake and almost...
David Foster Wallace
Yet
again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in
morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a
rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of
any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with
someone else's depth or failure.
Alan Watts
I would begin to think that I wanted to do something, but then I would become incapable of distinguishing between the probable results of doing it and of not doing it. I often get the feeling that things around me have lost their proper balance, though it could be that my perceptions are playing tricks on me.
Haruki Murakami
Being a geek is all about being honest about what you enjoy and not being afraid to demonstrate that affection. It means never having to play it cool about how much you like something. It’s basically a license to proudly emote on a somewhat childish level rather than behave like a supposed adult. Being a geek is extremely liberating.
Simon Pegg
While you’re playing yourself out in lonesome dissipation in front of a pinball machine, someone else might be reading through Proust. Still another might be engaged in heavy petting with a girlfriend at a drive-in theater showing of Paths of Courage. The one could well become a writer, witness to the age; the others, a happily married couple. Pinball machines, however, won’t lead you anywhere.
Just the replay light. Replay, replay, replay...
Haruki Murakami
God! Banish the thought. Why don't you tell me that 'if the girl had been worth having she'd have waited for you;? No, sir, the girl really worth having won't wait for anybody. If I thought there'd be another I'd lose my remaining faith in human nature. Maybe I'll play- but Rosalind was the only girl in the wide world that could have held me.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Encounters taking the form of challenge-and-response are the most illuminating kind of events a for student of human affairs if he believes, as I believe, that one of the most distinctive characteristics of Man is the he is partially free to make choices.... Encounters are the occasions in human life on which freedom and creativity come into play and on which new things are brought into existence.
Arnold J. Toynbee
He said, and his voice was strained as if he had had a mortal wound, 'Gwenhwyfar-' He so seldom spoke her formal name, it was always my lady or my queen, or when he spoke to her in play it was always Gwen. When he spoke it now, it seemed to her she had never heard a sweeter sound. 'Gwenhwyfar. Why do you weep?'Now she must lie, and lie well, because, she could not in honor tell him the truth. She said, 'Because-' and stopped, and then, in a choking voice, she said, 'because I do not know how...
Marion Zimmer Bradley