Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.

Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.

Culture arises and unfolds in and as play... culture itself bears the character of play.

Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.

You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.

Educators are aware that they can reach the youth only by making use of gang spirit and guiding it, not by working against it.

The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.

If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it.

The modern city hardly knows a pure darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.

Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.

Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.

We don't want to just tell [students] who the people are, we don't want to just tell them what happened - we want to show the process by which it formed itself.

If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor.

Impossible things are simply those which so far have never been done.

Life begins at 40 - but so do fallen arches, rheumatism, faulty eyesight, and the tendency to tell a story to the same person, three or four times.

I like being a mother, and I want to be involved in my work, so I have to make choices. If you're a film actress, your career is from 20 to 45, but you can still dream.

In my end is my beginning

The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us

Well, first of all," said the BFG, "human beans is not really believing in giants, is they? Human beans is not thinking we exist.

So please ask yourself: What would I do if I weren't afraid? And then go do it.