Quotes About Ownership

People sometimes act as though owning books you haven't read constitutes a charade or pretense, but for me, there's a lovely mystery and pregnancy about a book that hasn't given itself over to you yet--sometimes I'm the most inspired by imagining what the contents of an unread book might be. ~ Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude

I do lend my books, but I have to be a bit selective because my marginalia are so incriminating." --Alison Bechdel

I hate lending, or borrowing—if you want me to read a book, tell me about it, or buy me a copy outright. Your loaned edition sits in my house like a real grievance. And in lieu of lending books, I buy extra copies of those I want to give away, which gives me the added pleasure of buying books I love again and again." --Jonathan Lethem

There is a simple rule: practice a kind of generous selfishness. Give a book to a friend, but don't lend it, because you will never get it back. ~ James Wood, author of The Book Against God.

Take responsibility for making your own life beautiful.

What can you take from me which is not already yours?

Possession of anything begins in the mind.

Now they broke my toothbrush, I don't own anything.

Fine." I turned and pinned him with the coldest, cruelest, most accusatory glare I could muster. "Do I still own a glass I can drink from instead?" He shifted in his seat. "I didn't think so.

I held out my book. It was precious to me, as were all the things I'd written; even where I despised their inadequacy there was not one I would disown. Each tore its way from my entrails. Each had shortened my life, killed me with its own special little death.

Rule three hundred of obscure leadership if it's your idea, you get to implement it.

I'm reminded of a book my father used to read me," she said. "A bunch of elves and things get into a huge war over a piece of jewelry that everybody wants but nobody can wear.

Stealing is not excusable if, for instance, you are in a museum and you decide that a certain painting would look better in your house, and you simply grab the painting and take it there. But if you were very, very hungry, and you had no way of obtaining money, it might be excusable to grab the painting, take it to your house, and eat it. "We

I put the gun and the scarf into the brown paper bag again. And I locked it into the desk where I kept unpaid bills, Fiona's jewellery and letters from the bank about my overdraft.

Maggie, but he said the money was his. I lent him the jeep to get to the bus station.' 'Thanks for nothing,

Because assigning blame assigns responsibility. So I blame myself and give myself the responsibility to make it right.

I was not born in a vacuum. Every thought I have belongs to someone else.

The life that I have Is all that I have And the life that I have Is yours. The love that I have Of the life that I have Is yours and yours and yours. A sleep I shall have A rest I shall have Yet death will be but a pause. For the peace of my years In the long green grass Will be yours and yours and yours.

Jews participated in the ownership of human beings right up through to the nineteenth century, and biblical texts were quoted by some Civil War–era American rabbis to justify the South's "peculiar institution.

The earth is the general and equal possession of all humanity and therefore cannot be the property of individuals.

Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death. But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself.

because blaming our behavior on forces outside ourselves is a way of avoiding responsibility.

Nobody wrote The End in Story Thieves: The Stolen Chapters, and placed it on his shelf.

He existed a step or two to one side of the common world, largely out of sight, a shadow, all but invisible. Whatever he owned, either he could hoist it on his back and lug it along or he could walk away from it. Anonymity was the thing he loved most about the city, being a part of it and apart from it at the same time.