When the playful me shows up, I am ready to be a serious learner … a culture of playfulness is closely related to the capacity to learn.

I do not think that you can be changing the end of a song or a story like that, as though it were quite separate from the rest. I think the end of a story is part of it from the beginning.

Better to be a laughing-stock than lose the fort for fear of being one.

...extraordinarily beautiful, and slightly out of focus.

When the playful me shows up, I am ready to be a serious learner … a culture of playfulness is closely related to the capacity to learn.

And it came to Marcus suddenly that slaves very seldom whistled. They might sing, if they felt like it or if the rhythm helped their work, but whistling was in some way different; it took a free man to make the sort of noise Esca was making.

We shall have made such a blaze that men will remember us on the other side or the dark.