Horseplay Quotes

Conversation often becomes mere verbal performance and oral horseplay rather than fair-minded communication. ("Juicy rumours ") ~ Erik Pevernagie

Walt, at about eleven, had a routine of looking at Seymour's wrists and telling him to take off his sweater. "Take off your sweater, hey, Seymour. Go ahead, hey. It's warm in here." S. would beam back at him, shine back at him. He loved that kind of horseplay from any of the kids. I did, too, but only off and on. He did invariably. He thrived, too, waxed strong, on all tactless or underconsidered remarks directed at him by family minors. In 1959, in fact, when on occasion I hear rather nettling news of the doings of my youngest brother and sister, I think on the quantities of joy they brought S. I remember Franny, at about four, sitting on his lap, facing him, and saying, with immense admiration, "Seymour, your teeth are so nice and yellow!" He literally staggered over to me to ask if I'd heard what she said. ~ J.D. Salinger

Buttercups"

When we were children our papas were stout
And colorless as seaweed or the floats
At anchor off New Bedford. We were shut
In gardens where our brassy sailor coats
Made us like black-eyed susans bending out
Into the ocean, Then my teeth were cut:
A levelled broom-pole butt
Was pushed into my thin
And up-turned chin--
There were shod hoofs behind the horseplay. But
I played Napoleon in my attic cell
Until my shouldered broom
Bobbed down the room
With horse and neighing shell.

Recall the shadows the doll-curtains veined
On ancrem Winslow's ponderous plate from blue
China, the breaking of time's haggard tide
On the huge cobwebbed print of Waterloo,
With a cracked smile across the glass. I cried
To see the Emperor's sabered eagle slide
From the clutching grenadier
Staff-officer
With the gold leaf cascading down his side--
A red dragoon, his plough-horse rearing, swayed
Back on his reins to crop
The buttercup
Bursting upon the braid ~ Robert Lowell

As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity
say, while waiting to be called to eat
becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life.
The requisite for any of these varieties of incidental play is not pretentious equipment of any sort, but rather space at an immediately convenient and interesting place. The play gets crowded out if sidewalks are too narrow relative to the total demands put on them. It is especially crowded out if the sidewalks also lack minor irregularities in building line. An immense amount of both loitering and play goes on in shallow sidewalk niches out of the line of moving pedestrian feet. ~ Jane Jacobs

At paces that might stun and dismay the religious jogger, the runners easily kept up all manner of chatter and horseplay. When they occasionally blew by a huffing fatty or an aging road runner, they automatically toned down the banter to avoid overwhelming, to preclude the appearance of show boating (not that they slowed in the slightest). They in fact respected these distant cousins of the spirit, who, among all people, had some modicum of insight into their own days and ways. But the runners resembled them only in the sense that a puma resembles a pussy cat. It is the difference between stretching lazily on the carpet and prowling the jungle for fresh red meat. ~ John L. Parker Jr.