“The important thing in life is not what you get, but what you throw out.”

Saul Leiter

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“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

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“We moved today to 415 Central Park West. Enormous business of packing and unpacking my books, which I have been carrying on my back for so many years. Lord, how I would like to get free of all these things sometime. I date my maturity from the day I realized there were books I could get along without.”

Alfred Kazin

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“Why do some of the current Mercedes models have no dipstick, for example? What are the attractions of being disburdened of involvement with our own stuff?

Matthew B. Crawford

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“Wabi-sabi acknowledges that just as it is important to know when to make choices, it is also important to know when not to make choices: to let things be. Even at the most austere level of material existence, we still live in a world of things. Wabi-sabi is exactly about the delicate balance between the pleasure we get from things and the pleasure we get from freedom from things.”

Leonard Koren

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‎”For some weeks now I have been engaged in dispersing the contents of this apartment, trying to persuade hundreds of inanimate objects to scatter and leave me alone. It is not a simple matter. I am impressed by the reluctance of one’s worldly goods to go out again into the world.”

E. B. White

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“A home is like a reservoir equipped with a check valve: the valve permits influx but prevents outflow. Acquisition goes on night and day—smoothly, subtly, imperceptibly. I have no sharp taste for acquiring things, but it is not necessary to desire things in order to acquire them.”

E. B. White

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“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

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“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

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“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

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“Five moves, they say, equal a fire. But those who haven’t moved may begin to need a fire.”

Mary Catherine Bateson

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“I am doing it right over again. I am sick of clothes and gewgaws and bags and advertisements and newspaper clippings and society pages and the new Vogue and fittings and the main floors of department stores and the radio—jazz and magazines and hairdressers. I am sick sick to death of them. But I clutch at them madly, like smoking or drinking—anything to keep from thinking.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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“One learns first of all in beach living the art of shedding; how little one can get along with, not how much. Physical shedding to begin with, which then mysteriously spreads into other fields. Clothes, first. Of course, one needs less in the sun. But one needs less anyway, one finds suddenly. One does not need a closet-full, only a small suitcase-full. And what a relief it is! Less taking up and down of hems, less mending, and—best of all—less worry about what to wear. One finds one is shedding not only clothes—but vanity.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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“Oh, domesticity! The wonder of dinner plates and cream pitchers. You know your friends by their ornaments. You want everything. If Mrs. A has her mama’s old jelly mold, you want one, too, and everything that goes with it—the family, the tradition, the years of having jelly molded in it. We domestic sensualists live in a state of longing, no matter how comfortable our own places are.”

Laurie Colwin

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“I have been in a slow process of selling and giving away everything I own…It started a couple of years ago. It was in response to going to these Golden Globe type events and they just give you stuff. You don’t want it. You don’t use it. And then Mad Men started to become a success on a popular level and people started sending me stuff, just boxes of shit. Gifts for every holiday, clothes. One day, I looked around and thought ‘I don’t want this stuff, I didn’t ask for it.’ So I started giving it to friends or charity stores, or if it is still in its box I might sell it for a hundred bucks. I liked it so I didn’t stop.”

Vincent Kartheiser

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