Toys Quotes

“If little else, the brain is an educational toy.

The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometime they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some people's game, they say that you have "lost your marbles," not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

“Many people are caught up with the toys of contemporary society. Because of great advancements in our culture, some have cultivated an attitude of “comfortability.” They may be going to hell, but it is going to be a comfortable ride for them.”
― A.W. Tozer, And He Dwelt Among Us: Teachings from the Gospel of John

“The wood-carver can fashion whatever he will. Yet his products are but toys of the moment, to be glanced at in jest, not fashioned according to any precept or law. When times change, the carver too will change his style and make new trifles to hit the fancy of the passing day. But there is another kind of artist, who sets more soberly about his work, striving to give real beauty to the things which men actually use and to give to them the shape which tradition has ordained. This maker of real things must not for a moment be confused with the maker of idle toys.”
― Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

“He’s always been attracted to broken things. He was the kind of boy who talked the bad girls through their problems, who defended them and didn’t take advantage. He was sensitive to his stuffed animals’ feelings, rotating their position on his bed so that a new plush animal would occupy pride of place at his pillowside every night. Soon I became first and foremost on that pillow; princess of the island of misfit toys.”
― Jalina Mhyana, Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes

“In the past few decades quite a few people have suggested -- citing most often the offence of impossible proportions -- that Barbie dolls teach young girls to hate themselves. But the opposite may be true. British researchers recently found that girls between the ages of seven and eleven harbor surprisingly strong feelings of dislike for their Barbie dolls, with no other toy or brand name inspiring such a negative response from the children. The dolls "provoked rejection, hatred, and violence" and many girls preferred Barbie torture -- by cutting, burning, decapitating, or microwaving -- over other ways of playing with the doll. Reasons that the girls hated their Barbies included, somewhat poetically, the fact that they were 'plastic.' The researchers also noted that the girls never spoke of one single, special Barbie, but tended to talk about having a box full of anonymous Barbies. 'On a deeper level Barbie has become inanimate,' one of the researchers remarked. 'She has lost any individual warmth that she might have possessed if she were perceived as a singular person. This may go some way towards explaining the violence and torture.”
― Eula Biss, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009

“This is an odd one. You have one country in the world where a word has a deeper meaning, it can really mess with design plans. ...But we have a difficult situation here so I guess we'll be looking at putting different sound chips in the dolls heading there [Britain].”
― Todd McFarlane

“A distinctive appearance and a simple set of characteristics lead to an extremely flexible brand. (pg. 38)”
― Woodrow Phoenix, Plastic Culture: How Japanese Toys Conquered the World

“The imaginary child implied by the toys on exhibit in Hong Kong was impossible to reconcile with my actual child. I didn't think I'd like to meet the imaginary child they implied. That child was mad with contradictions. He was a machine-gun-toting, Chopin-playing psychopath with a sugar high and a short attention span.”
― Donovan Hohn, Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them

“We were fascinated by the little glass spheres, by those dark waves of color, some narrow and drawn out into several swirls, and others that widened out in the center of the marble into a single bundle and thinned out smoothly at the ends. There were reddish streaks in Añuco's new marbles, but in the cloudy, chipped ones the bands of color also appeared, strangely and inexplicably.”
― José Maria Arguedas, Antología poética

“A toy cannot save a life, but it can save a soul.”
― Robert Dinsdale, The Toymakers

“A Toy A Day Keeps Sadness Away”
― The Unboxing Toys

“Improvement, to be found in all things.”
― Alogaristw

“Meet Me In Toyland by Stewart Stafford

Santa handed me the keys to Toyland,
And, placing them squarely in the palm of my hand,
He bid me go and have lots of fun,
With all kinds of everyone.

I skipped across the gingerbread bridge,
Yuletide coffee flowing down from the ridge,
To a Christmas tree consisting of mint,
Lit all around by falling star glint.

At the frosting gates of Castle St Nicholas,
Silver snake tinsel began to hiss,
As polar bears to a clockwork orchestra danced,
With elves as their partners gleefully entranced.

Multitudes of children whooped and cheered,
Forgetting all their doubts and fears,
Celebrating their gifts of toys,
With every kind of girl and boy.

Alas, our midwinter joy came to an end,
And I tearfully bid adieu to all my new friends,
And took a shooting star comet home,
Across the Northern Lights in the sky’s dome.

© Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Not every kid is fascinated by toys and not every girl is captured by boys.”
― Goitsemang Mvula

“God lets men have their playthings, like the children they are, that they may learn to distinguish them from true possessions. If they are not learning that, he takes them from them, and tries the other way: for lack of them and its misery, they will perhaps seek the true!”
― George MacDonald, Donal Grant

“This is just a game,' Nicasia says. 'But sometimes we play too hard with our toys. And then they break.'

'It's not like we drowned you ourselves,' Valerian calls.”
― Holly Black, The Cruel Prince

“French toys are usually based on imitation, they are meant to produce children who are users, not creators.”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“Henceforth, toys are chemical in substance and colour; their very material introduces one to a coenaethesis of use, not pleasure. These toys die in fact very quickly, and once dead, they have no posthumous life for the child.”
― Roland Barthes, Mythologies

“If there is a species which is more maltreated than children, then it must be their toys, which they handle in an incredibly off-hand manner (how long will it be before someone starts a society for the protection of battered and maltreated objects?). Toys are thus the end point in that long chain in which all the conditions of despotic high-handedness are in play which enchain beings one to another, from one species to another - from cruel divinities to their sacrificial victims, from masters to slaves, from adults to children, and from children to their objects. This is actually the only strong symbolic chain, the one through which a victim of the whim of a superior power passes it on to an inferior species, the whole process ending with someone taking it out on a powerless simulacrum, like a toy - and beginning no doubt with an all-powerful simulacrum, like the masked divinities which men themselves invent to justify this wretched chain.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“That old saying “he who dies with the most toys wins” couldn’t be more fallacious. Toys are just things and if you give up the precious time doing the things you love, with the people you love, simply to acquire toys, you’re wasting a whole lot more than just money.”
― Michael ONeill, Road Work: Images And Insights Of A Modern Day Explorer

“Minimize your kids' playtime possessions and you may find that they become less selfish and less materialistic, cherish more and take better care of the toys they do have, and have more time for reading, writing, art, and imaginative play. They might spend more time with real live human beings. They might even go outdoors!”
― Joshua Becker, The Minimalist Home: A Room-by-Room Guide to a Decluttered, Refocused Life

“Somebody gives a lonely child a toy and they pour all their hopes and fears and problems into it. Do it long enough and intensely enough, and then it just needs a stray bit of bad luck and the toy wakes up. Of course, it knows that the only reason it is alive is because of the child. A tiny personal god with one worshipper. It latches on and... well.' She clicked her tongue. 'Normally, you get them pried off and burned long before adolescence. Impressive that it lasted this long.”
― T. Kingfisher, Nettle & Bone

“Where is his room?' she whispered.

'Up there, I think' replied April. Let's follow the toys.”
― Bob Graham, April and Esme, Tooth Fairies

“While the poor devours food, the rich toys with it.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“As we get older, the toys get more expensive…” - Chris Geiger”
― Chris Geiger

“You keep buying your children toy pistols, then you wonder, why there is no peace in the world!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Bulletproof Backbone: Injustice Not Allowed on My Watch

“Like the Velveteen Rabbit of Margery Williams's perennially best-selling children's book, plush makers are animated by the prospect of their creations becoming the first thing a child loves and values.”
― Zac Bissonnette, The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute

“Kids who grew up in Naperville remember trading them in the first half of 1995, close to a year before the rest of the country had heard of them, and a few teachers had banned Beanies from their classrooms because they'd become a distraction.”
― Zac Bissonnette, The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute

“The speculative boom for Beanie Babies has resulted in an unsurpassed volume of high-quality, perfectly preserved, monetarily worthless plush animals for children most in need of the comfort of something soft.”
― Zac Bissonnette, The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute

“The donations are usually anonymous, because while philanthropy is a source of pride, philanthropy as the exit strategy of last resort from a comically bad investment isn't.”
― Zac Bissonnette, The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute