“If there were libraries for musical instruments and for furniture, that would be great. Just to have something for a while, and then be able to let it go again.”
Will Oldham
more infosource: Will Oldham on Bonnie “Prince” Billy, ed. by Alan Licht (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2012), 315.
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category: consumerism, library, possession, stuff
medium: Interview
“I’m not somebody who likes to possess. I’m not the person who has six hundred suits. I want to have two suits. Actually, I want to have one suit, and I replace it.”
Tomas Maier
more infosource: “Just Have Less: Bottega Veneta’s Tomas Maier,” by John Colapinto, The New Yorker, January 3, 2011, 34.
category: clothes, fashion, materialism, possession, stuff, suit
medium:
“The profound modesty she had—that made her possess, not no belongings at all (no asceticism), but very few belongings—as if she wanted, at her death, that there would be no ‘getting rid of’ what had belonged to her.”
Roland Barthes
more infosource: entry dated October 3, 1978, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 201.
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category: death, modesty, mother, possession, stuff
medium: diary
notes: On index cards, Roland Barthes starting keeping a mourning diary the day after his mother died in October 1977.
“I turned sixty-nine on June 10th, ’84. On that day Alexandra said she was divorcing me. She moved out of the apartment then and there. Not before she had applied circular stickers, big ones, green and white, to her possessions and mine. Even bathrobes and carpet slippers carried these gummed labels, a weird snowfall of large round green and white flakes.”
Saul Bellow
more infosource: letter to Hymen Slate, dated July 25, 1996, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 521–22.
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category: color, divorce, possession, stuff
medium: letter
possession