Playing In The Sandbox Quotes

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time.

When my daughter was a toddler, I used to take her to a park not far from our apartment. One day as she was playing in a sandbox, an ice-cream salesman approached us. I purchased her a treat, and when I turned to give it to her, I saw her mouth was full of sand. Where I had intended to put a delicacy, she had put dirt. Did I love her with dirt in her mouth? Absolutely. Was she any less of my daughter with dirt in her mouth? Of course not. Was I going to allow her to keep the dirt in her mouth? No way. I loved her right where she was, but I refused to leave her there. I carried her over to the water fountain and washed out her mouth. Why? Because I love her. God does the same for us. He holds us over the fountain. "Spit out the dirt, honey," our Father urges. "I've got something better for you." And so he cleanses us of filth; immorality, dishonesty, prejudice, bitterness, greed. We don't enjoy the cleansing; sometimes we even opt for the dirt over the ice cream. "I can eat dirt if I want to!" we pout and proclaim. Which is true—we can. But if we do, the loss is ours. God has a better offer.

So here were the facts: I felt possessive of her. Not in a romantic sort of way, but in a "hit her over the head, drag her off by the hair, and fuck her" way. Like she was my toy and I was keeping the other boys in the sandbox from playing with her. How sick was that? If she ever heard me admit to that, she would cut off my balls and feed them to me.

It’s either this or that. Decide and move forward. You spend so much time playing in your mind, like a sandbox. Everything just slipping through your fingers, nothing solid to hold.

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books.

You spend so much time playing in your mind, like a sandbox. Everything just slipping through your fingers, nothing solid to hold.

Fan writers call it “playing in someone else’s sandbox” or “borrowing someone’s toys.” I call it “writing.” Opponents call it “stealing”—and I call that bullshit.

Lisa's friendship was less of a choice than a fact of life. It worked out well - kind of symbiotic, actually. I beat up anyone who messed with her, and she made sure my homework got done. Fair trade, right? Honestly, if not for Lisa's constant nagging, I'd probably still be crouched in our kindergarten sandbox eating glue and playing Neferet demons.

That’s what happens when you crowd enough folks into the same sandbox: eventually they’re gonna start throwing a fit over who gets what part to play with.

Believe it or not, the notions of free will and destiny are not mutually exclusive. Predestination is the universal framework of limits (based on natural physical laws) placed upon us. Free will is our infinite ability to make choices within that framework. Because the universal scale is so great—and most of it constitutes an undiscovered frontier—our choices are only limited by our knowledge, our abilities, and our imagination. To put it simply, the world is such a huge playground sandbox that we will never run out of sand or reach the faraway safety fence of destiny. So go out there and play!

I feel calmed and relieved when my husband knocks at my study door in the middle of a fight, puts his arms around me, and says, “I love you. This is stupid. Let’s just drop it.” Like two kids in the sandbox, we’re suddenly light and playful again.

Some of these stories, it is understood, are not to be passed on to my father, because they would upset him. It is well known that women can deal with this sort of thing better than men can. Men are not to be told anything they might find too painful; the secret depths of human nature, the sordid physicalities, might overwhelm or damage them. For instance, men often faint at the sight of their own blood, to which they are not accustomed. For this reason you should never stand behind one in the line at the Red Cross donor clinic. Men, for some mysterious reason, find life more difficult than women do. (My mother believes this, despite the female bodies, trapped, diseased, disappearing, or abandoned, that litter her stories.) Men must be allowed to play in the sandbox of their choice, as happily as they can, without disturbance; otherwise they get cranky and won't eat their dinners. There are all kinds of things that men are simply not equipped to understand, so why expect it of them? Not everyone shares this believe about men; neverthetheless, it has its uses.

I kind of understood at a young age that I didn’t play well with most other kids in the sandbox.

...but stop thinking what you think I’m thinking because you’re wrong. Pike’s just pissed I won’t go play in his sandbox. Well, my sandbox is full. No room for more than one and he’s already here. -Grace from Tainted (Fey Court Trilogy) Book 2 Release July 2012

You will have noticed that I didn’t give this story a pat conclusion, and that’s deliberate. Katherine (my wife and frequent coauthor, K. A. Applegate) and I were among the earliest authors to encounter fan fiction via the internet. We’ve embraced it from the start. And some part of me hopes that fanfic writers will carry this story forward. Don’t ask me what happens to these characters next, because I don’t know. Will Dekka find love, perhaps with Simone? Will Cruz and Armo? How will Sam and Astrid do in this terrifying extension of earlier trauma? Maybe you have some ideas. I built the sandbox; if you want to bring your pails and shovels and play in it, cool. It’s one of the best things about writing for young people: you are my collaborators in imagination. If I leave blanks it’s because I know you’ll fill them.

Men, for some mysterious reason, find life more difficult than women do. (My mother believes this, despite the female bodies, trapped, diseased, disappearing, or abandoned, thayt litter her stories.) Men must be allowed to play in the sandbox of their choice, as happily as they can, without disturbance; otherwise they get cranky and won't eat their dinners. There are all kinds of things men aren't equipped to understand, so why expect it of them? Not everyone shares this belief about men; nevertheless, it has it's uses.

The residue from radium extraction looked like seaside sand, and the company had offloaded this industrial waste by selling it to schools and playgrounds to use in their children’s sandboxes; kids’ shoes were reported to have turned white because of it, while one little boy complained to his mother of a burning sensation in his hands. Yet, in comments that made reassuring reading, von Sochocky pronounced the sand “most hygienic”10 for children to play in, “more beneficial than the mud of world-renowned curative baths.”11

In October 1920, her former employer was featured in the local news. The residue from radium extraction looked like seaside sand, and the company had offloaded this industrial waste by selling it to schools and playgrounds to use in their children’s sandboxes; kids’ shoes were reported to have turned white because of it, while one little boy complained to his mother of a burning sensation in his hands. Yet, in comments that made reassuring reading, von Sochocky pronounced the sand “most hygienic”10 for children to play in, “more beneficial than the mud of world-renowned curative baths.”11

For their optimism, these few spent years being disparaged as futurists, as impractical dreamers, as kids playing in a sandbox—until suddenly, in the fall of 2015 and the spring of 2016, the industry recognized that the future the visionaries described wasn’t just possible. It was practical and desirable, and coming sooner than anyone might have ever thought.

In October 1920, her former employer was featured in the local news. The residue from radium extraction looked like seaside sand, and the company had offloaded this industrial waste by selling it to schools and playgrounds to use in their children’s sandboxes; kids’ shoes were reported to have turned white because of it, while one little boy complained to his mother of a burning sensation in his hands. Yet, in comments that made reassuring reading, von Sochocky pronounced the sand “most hygienic”10 for children to play in, “more beneficial than the mud of world-renowned curative baths.

Hey! Can you hear me? I’m talking to the American asshole who just told my daughter she was going to die. She says you put something inside her head, some sort of explosive. If that’s true, you better hope that thing doesn’t go off because if it does, you might as well kill yourself. I know what you’re thinking. There’s a good chance Moscow will do the same thing and kill me. There’s always a possibility the Chinese or Koreans will kill me, but I wouldn’t bet on that. You see, I’m not the easiest person to be with. I can be a bit of a dick sometimes, just ask my daughter. My point is if people keep me around, it’s not because of my charming personality, it’s because I have legs that bend the wrong way, and that’s kind of useful if you also happen to have Themis. So on the off chance that I make it through this, I want you to listen to me very carefully. I don’t give a shit who this robot belongs to an hour from now. I will fucking kill you. I will mow down whatever place you work at and the house you live in. I will kill everyone you’ve ever known, your high-school teacher, people you play softball with. I will march down Washington Avenue and turn DC into a fucking sandbox. I will end you and everything you hold dear. There. Will. Be. No United States when I’m done with you, and there is nothing, not a goddamn thing, you can do to stop me. Do you hear me? DO YOU HEAR ME, MOTHERFUCKER? ANSWER ME!

That’s because we misunderstand play itself, casting it as exuberant, silly, a frippery that signals to us that our children are still young enough to have not yet turned their minds to more weighty endeavours. But play is serious. Play is absolute. Play is the complete absorption in something that doesn’t matter to the external world, but which matters completely to you. It’s an immersion in your own interests that becomes a feeling in itself, a potent emotion. Play is a disappearance into a space of our choosing, invisible to those outside the game. It is the pursuit of pure flow, a sandbox mind in which we can test new thoughts, new selves. It’s a form of symbolic living, a way to transpose one reality onto another and mine it for meaning. Play is a form of enchantment.

Though she had spoken only rarely and had had no real friends, everybody possessed his own vivid memories of Cecilia. Some of us had held her for five minutes as a baby while Mrs. Lisbon ran back into the house to gether purse. Some of us had played in the sandbox with her, fighting over a shovel, or had exposed ourselves to her behind the mulberry tree that grew like deformed flesh through the chain link fence. We had stood in line with her for smallpox vaccinations, had held polio sugar cubes under our tongues with her, had taught her to jump rope, to light snakes, had stopped her from picking her scabs on numerous occasions, and had cautioned her against touching her mouth to the drinking fountain at Three Mile Park. A few of us had fallen in love with her, but had kept it to ourselves, knowing that she was the weird sister.

Our precious lives, when you step back and look at them, are a kind of game. Try imagining the game described by the exciting copy above. A literal once-in-a-lifetime adventure—the grand game of life. You start playing. First, there’s a random character creation process that proceeds automatically as a collaboration between your parents. There’s the heartwarming opening with your mom and your dad and a thousand blessings and all that, and then finally, you get to dive in. You get a rough grasp on the controls, and then you’re tossed into “school,” a microcosmic tutorial for the heavy seas of society— The game’s setting—Earth. Awaiting us as we’re tossed into a corner of that oversized map is a massive sandbox game. There we have a vast array of choices, a spectacular degree of freedom, and countless minigames. Inspired by the hype, we advance just as advertised, but it’s not long before we realize something. —We’ve been had.

Today we place lots of emphasis on increasing racial diversity in our churches. That’s a good thing. It’s needed. But there’s more to having a genuinely mosaic church than just racial and socioeconomic diversity. We also have to learn to work through the passionate and mutually exclusive opinions that we have in the realms of politics, theology, and ministry priorities. The world is watching to see if our modern-day Simon the Zealots and Matthew the tax collectors can learn to get along for the sake of the Lord Jesus. If not, we shouldn’t be surprised if it no longer listens to us. Jesus warned us that people would have a hard time believing that he was the Son of God and that we were his followers if we couldn’t get along. Whenever we fail to play nice in the sandbox, we give people on the outside good reason to write us off, shake their heads in disgust, and ask, “What kind of Father would have a family like that?”1 BEARING WITH ONE ANOTHER To create and maintain the kind of unity that exalts Jesus as Lord of all, we have to learn what it means to genuinely bear with one another. I fear that for lots of Christians today, bearing with one another is nothing more than a cliché, a verse to be memorized but not a command to obey.2 By definition, bearing with one another is an act of selfless obedience. It means dying to self and overlooking things I’d rather not overlook. It means working out real and deep differences and disagreements. It means offering to others the same grace, mercy, and patience when they are dead wrong as Jesus offers to me when I’m dead wrong. As I’ve said before, I’m not talking about overlooking heresy, embracing a different gospel, or ignoring high-handed sin. But I am talking about agreeing to disagree on matters of substance and things we feel passionate about. If we overlook only the little stuff, we aren’t bearing with one another. We’re just showing common courtesy.

What about the backyard stuff?” he asked. “What about it?” “Is it okay if I use it, too?” “Oh, sure. The equipment is in a metal shed in the back. Just help yourself. It’s not locked or anything. And if you want company, just let me know. I’d be happy to play with you.” Did I just say that? I did not just say that. Like we were six years old and heading for a sandbox. He was grinning again, like he thought it was funny or stupid or I was having a Tiffany moment. “I didn’t mean play with you exactly,” I said. “I meant…you know, keep you company so you don’t feel awkward…you know, like I exercised with you.” “I’ll be okay alone in the backyard.” He stepped off the treadmill. “I’m going to go shower.” He waited a heartbeat, like he expected me to say I’d be happy to keep him company in the shower, too. Fortunately, my brain finally kicked in, and I kept my mouth shut. I watched him walk out of the room. I thought I’d known everything that would be involved in having a baseball player living with us for the summer. I was discovering that I didn’t have a clue.

You, then, are very much at play in the Kingdom, like a child in a sandbox. And each event that arises for you need not be judged. I have shared with you many times that it is the egoic mind that compares and contrasts. Therefore, never compare or contrast your experience with another person’s. Yours is unique. And though the world would say, perhaps, that your experience is not as valuable because you are only worth twenty thousand dollars and somebody else is worth four hundred million, therefore, they have manifested more powerfully, that is simply not true. For manifestation is simply the expression that reveals where the mind has been focusing. The real power is the very mystery that anything can be manifested at all. And you are free to constantly choose anew. Cultivate, then, a very childlike attitude toward all of your experience. Learn to ponder it, to wonder about it, to look upon it like a father does to a child, like your Father does to you: Behold, I have created all things and it is good! In your Bible in the creation story that is told there, it is said that God said something like that. For God looked upon all that She had created and said, “Behold, it is very good!” You are the father of your creations. You are the father of your thoughts, your attitudes, and your choices. Look upon all of these things and say, “Behold, it is very good.” For goodness begets goodness. Judgment begets judgment. For nothing can produce except that which is like itself. An acorn cannot produce a fish. A man and a woman cannot produce an acorn. The thoughts you hold about yourself will reproduce themselves. When you look upon all things as good, goodness will be begotten from that decision. Each time, then, that you have chosen to hold a negative thought about yourself, or about anyone, you have only insured the kind of inconsistency in your mind that interrupts the power of your ability to create, more and more, as a living embodied master. This can only be because you have held deep within the mind some belief that says, “No matter what I do, it won’t work out.” There is some conflicted belief. A belief in goodness and a belief in evil create a conflict that must entrap the soul.

If a shift in practice, action, or thought generates more embodiment, creativity, empowerment, sweetness, clarity, astuteness, love, energy, or connection, this is probably a solid sign that it’s adding value and enhancing your life for the better. If it does the opposite and detracts vitality over and over and over again, let it go, compost it, and trust in your ability to begin a new inquiry. Playing in the sandbox of experimentation also welcomes us into relationship with the process of creating messes.

Activities to Develop the Tactile Sense Rub-a-Dub-Dub—Encourage the child to rub a variety of textures against her skin. Offer different kinds of soap (oatmeal soap, shaving cream, lotion soap) and scrubbers (loofah sponges, thick washcloths, foam pot-scrubbers, plastic brushes). Water Play—Fill the kitchen sink with sudsy water and unbreakable pitchers and bottles, turkey basters, sponges, eggbeaters, and toy water pumps. Or, fill a washtub with water and toys and set it on the grass. Pouring and measuring are educational and therapeutic, as well as high forms of entertainment. Water Painting—Give the child a bucket of water and paintbrush to paint the porch steps, the sidewalk, the fence, or her own body. Or, provide a squirt bottle filled with clean water (because the squirts often go in the child’s mouth). Finger Painting—Let the sensory craver wallow in this literally “sensational” activity. Encourage (but don’t force) the sensory avoider to stick a finger into the goop. For different tactile experiences, mix sand into the paint, or place a blob of shaving cream, peanut butter, or pudding on a plastic tray. Encourage him to draw shapes, letters, and numbers. If he “messes up,” he can erase the error with his hand and begin again. Finger Drawing—With your finger, “draw” a shape, letter, number, or design on the child’s back or hand. Ask the child to guess what it is and then to pass the design on to another person. Sand Play—In a sandbox, add small toys (cars, trucks, people, and dinosaurs), which the child can rearrange, bury, and rediscover. Instead of sand, use dried beans, rice, pasta, cornmeal, popcorn, and mud. Making mud pies and getting messy are therapeutic, too.

The equipment is in a metal shed in the back. Just help yourself. It’s not locked or anything. And if you want company, just let me know. I’d be happy to play with you.” Did I just say that? I did not just say that. Like we were six years old and heading for a sandbox. He was grinning again, like he thought it was funny or stupid or I was having a Tiffany moment. “I didn’t mean play with you exactly,” I said. “I meant…you know, keep you company so you don’t feel awkward…you know, like I exercised with you.” “I’ll be okay alone in the backyard.” He stepped off the treadmill. “I’m going to go shower.” He waited a heartbeat, like he expected me to say I’d be happy to keep him company in the shower, too.

The fact is that there will always be a power struggle between men and women in a “unisex”-mentality world. Only when women enjoy those strengths they have that men don’t, and enjoy the strengths men have that they as women don’t, will they be happier creatures and be able to play better in the sandbox called marriage.

Why not? Carry him around in a suitcase. People say, Where's your husband? all you do is open you bag, yell, Here he is! Like a silver cornet. Take him outa his case any old hour, play a tune, stash him away. Keep a little sandbox for him on the back porch.

He looked on them with the same amused detachment as Einstein, in the waning years of his life, must have felt watching children at play in a sandbox.

I long ago abandoned myself to a blind lust for the written word. Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to this visible world so I can retreat without much inconvenience into my inner world of books. Transmuting this sandy metaphor, if literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass - an hourglass that drains grain by grain. Literature gives me life, and life kills me. Well, life kills everyone.

Missions to Mars are basically sandbox play to these life-forms. And wouldn’t you know, they came here with the express purpose of neutralizing a barbaric species before more harmful space exploration practices could be established. Pretty much the Space Age equivalent of “Hey kid, step away from the hot stove before you burn your mitts off!

I think Geertz missed a trick. He made the boundaries of deep play too solid. I see deep play everywhere, expressed in infinite ways. It captures, for me, a quality of attention that is unexpected in adult life, and which we barely even recognise in children. That's because we misunderstand play itself, casting it as exuberant, silly, a frippery that signals to us that our children are still young enough to have not yet turned their minds to more weighty endeavours. But play is serious. Play is absolute. Play is the complete absorption in something that doesn't matter to the external world, but which matters completely to you. It's an immersion in your own interests that becomes a feeling in itself, a potent emotion. Play is a disappearance into a space of our choosing, invisible to those outside the game. It is the pursuit of pure flow, a sandbox mind in which we can test new thoughts, new selves. It's a form of symbolic living, a way to transpose one reality onto another and mine it for meaning. Play is a form of enchantment.

Love isn’t always about falling in love with a person. Love is passing your final exams. Love is watching the sun come up between the clouds. Love is finding the light when you were in the dark. Love is when your favorite TV show returns. Love is when your dog tilts its head with confusion. Love is a free ice cream voucher left on your car windshield. Love is the leaves falling in the fall. Love is learning the constellations. Love is solving a ridiculous math problem. Love is the changing Starbucks menu for the seasons. Love is watching a child play in the sandbox. Love is warm clothes when they come out of the dryer. When you say you’ve given up on love, all you’re really saying is that you’ve closed your eyes. Open them.

Mojang for letting me play in their sandbox.

A key characteristic of the engineering culture is that the individual engineer’s commitment is to technical challenge rather than to a given company. There is no intrinsic loyalty to an employer as such. An employer is good only for providing the sandbox in which to play. If there is no challenge or if resources fail to be provided, the engineer will seek employment elsewhere. In the engineering culture, people, organization, and bureaucracy are constraints to be overcome. In the ideal organization everything is automated so that people cannot screw it up. There is a joke that says it all. A plant is being managed by one man and one dog. It is the job of the man to feed the dog, and it is the job of the dog to keep the man from touching the equipment. Or, as two Boeing engineers were overheard to say during a landing at Seattle, “What a waste it is to have those people in the cockpit when the plane could land itself perfectly well.” Just as there is no loyalty to an employer, there is no loyalty to the customer. As we will see later, if trade-offs had to be made between building the next generation of “fun” computers and meeting the needs of “dumb” customers who wanted turnkey products, the engineers at DEC always opted for technological advancement and paid attention only to those customers who provided a technical challenge.

As Facebook kept evolving—and growing faster with every change—the established powers of the technology and media world began paying ever closer attention. This appeared to be the kind of irresistible consumer website every executive had dreamed of owning since the Internet took off in the mid-1990s. Mark Zuckerberg suddenly had a lot of new older, well-dressed friends from Los Angeles and the East Coast. But he didn’t think like the CEO of an established technology or media company. He barely gave a thought to profit and was still ambivalent about advertising. This wasn’t easy for his newfound suitors to understand. One senior executive from a tech company recalls a frustrating visit during that time with Zuckerberg, who seemed uninterested in increasing the company’s revenue. “He didn’t know what he didn’t know,” he says. “But when he opened his mouth he was very direct, very smart, and he was very focused on Facebook as a social tool, to the point of naïveté. It sounded just too altruistic at the time. So I asked him, ‘Is it a social tool as a tactic to get to the next point?’ And he says, ‘No, all I really care about is doing this social tool.’ So I thought, ‘Either this guy is being very strategic and not telling me what his next thing is, or he’s just got his sandbox and he’s playing in it.’ I couldn’t figure it out.

It could just as easily have been me. That reminder of human frailty and the role that fortune and misfortune play in our lives prevented me from becoming too prideful. Better men than me had died over in the sandbox, often purely by chance. Were you in the lead vehicle, or at the tail end of the convoy? Sometimes it came down to which side of a vehicle you were sitting on when something went ka-boom. Why did the invisible shard of flying metal hit the Marine to your right instead of you?

Domenico groaned. “Don’t call me that. Sounds like you’re expecting me to take my bucket and go play in the sandbox.

Brands play in an exciting sandbox of symbolic meanings.

A vision inspires, aligns, and directs. it says to other people, "here is what I am up to, come and play in my sandbox!

You cannot control how others treat you, but by pushing the pause button, by taking time to choose your response to situations, you can be far more in control and far more likely to make appropriate decisions.

Simon and I are like young children I have seen in the park sitting beside each other in the sandbox but playing alone, not interacting. Two people living separate lives in the same space.

A sentimental drunk and full of gin ’n’ juice pride, he’d brag to our black neighbors how I’d never spent a day in day care or had a sandbox play date. Instead, he swore up and down I was nannied and mammied by a sow named Suzy Q and was the loser in a sibling “piglet versus niglet” rivalry to a porcine genius named Savoir Faire.

The day went by very quickly. There was so much to do. Grandpa took them on a hayride. They played in the sandbox and rode their bikes. They made cupcakes with Grandma. Bedtime came faster than Claire, Andrew, or Griffin wanted.

Rather than each spouse seeking their own gratification, he and she should focus more on how to meet their mate’s needs and desires.

Hey, remember how we used to spend hours playing together in your sandbox? Wasn’t that so great? Well, now I really want t make out in your sandbox. Wait, where are you going? It doesn’t have to be in your sandbox!

consider what’s happening in this book when I describe sandbox play as the beginning of the age of the individual, dinner as the ritualized celebration of industrialization, television as a new hearth, clockwork mechanics as the foundation of twentieth-century developmental health, penmanship as up-skilling for a burgeoning capitalist economy, and card catalogs as a representation of an obsolete epistemological attitude. I’m situating the familiar technologies of the past in a hopeful story about a digital future—a future that requires folks to understand information in a drastically new way. If the old education cultivated habits of mind for a card-catalog world, then the new education needs to build habits of mind for a world of nonlinear hyperlinks. Luckily, situation theory can help.

Bring the big kid in you out to play more often. Take the sandbox into the boardroom and invite others in your team to think inside the box. Stay curious, imaginative, weird, daring, playful, and open because it's these very qualities that have spurred every innovation that we consider standard today.