We have been trained to think we have enormous power over the world. Whatever you dream, you can do. Anything can be bent to your will. But actually isn't it much more interesting to imagine that you're quite small?

I think the most important way to understand play is that it's this property that's in things. Like there's play in a mechanism. For example, there's some play in the steering column before it engages as you're turning the wheel.

When we use this word fun, it sort of bangs up the ordinary and the extraordinary altogether.

Normally we think of play as the opposite of work. Work is the thing you have to do, and then there's play, the thing you choose to do.

The idea of thinking of our relationships with people as also being structured by limitations and constraints can be useful.

Looking for meaning in the ordinary seems like the most urgent thing that we can do.

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.