Key Takeaways
- To play requires trust and love.
- This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.”
- A bromide about the creative process is that an artist’s first idea is usually the best one. Ichigo was not Sam and Sadie’s first idea. It was, perhaps, their thousandth. Herein, the difficulty. Sam and Sadie both knew what they liked in a game, and they could easily tell a good game from a bad game. For Sadie, that knowledge was not necessarily helpful. Her time with Dov and her years studying games in general had made her critical of everything. She could tell you exactly what was wrong with any game, but she didn’t necessarily know how to make a great game herself. There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.
- Other people’s parents are often a delight.
- Sam’s grandfather had two core beliefs: (1) all things were knowable by anyone, and (2) anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken. Sam believed these things as well.
- He was such a fan. Every collaboration needs one.
- Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met—he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn’t truly understood the nature of Marx’s good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know—were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had they just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard? He had certainly never mentioned persimmons before. My God, she thought, he is so easy to love.
- Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?
- The most important thing is finding someone you wish to play with.
- “And what is love, in the end?” Alabaster said. “Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?”
- “Love you, Sammy,” Dong Hyun said. “I love you, too, Grandpa.” For most of his life, Sam had found it difficult to say I love you. It was superior, he believed, to show love to those one loved. But now, it seemed like one of the easiest things in the world Sam could do. Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.
What I Got Out of It
- This book reminded me that the best collaborations are built on trust, play, and the willingness to keep showing up—even when it’s hard.
