77 Quotes by Ian Bogost

Even when we tell kids to go play, what do the kids do? They come up with a set of constraints and structures. "Oh, we're gonna build a fort out of clothes, and now that we're in the fort we're going to pretend that we're prisoners," or whatever.

We don't like to think of ourselves as subject to the forces of the world, we like to think of ourselves as exerting that force.

I think a lot of the misery that people experience comes from that sensation of boundlessness, of infinite possibility.

We're stuck in these situations with other people and our stuff and our jobs, and thinking that we can extract ourselves from those seems doomed to me. Instead, how can we live within those systems of constraints? We don't have to enjoy them, exactly, but at least acknowledge that those boundaries are real and that they structure our response to the world. And then once you do that, you allow yourself to say "I did my best given the circumstances."

The actual effort that you can exert upon the universe is fairly limited.

It's helpful to be prepared to celebrate the tiny things that you can do, where you meet the world and you negotiate an outcome that's quite tiny. But you can still make it feel remarkable.

No one wakes up and says, "Yay I get to mow the lawn!" But if I can find meaning there, then there's nowhere I can't find meaning.

God will not speak to me and tell me to mow my lawn today.

If you start the day not really expecting substantial change, but anticipating some small new revelation or some small alteration, then over time you're able to find them in more places.