logo

Quotes About Belongings

I was obsessed with this idea that these things that you collect, they just say so much about who you are. I can't say it came from hard-nosed business analysis... It was just something I really want to see built.
~ Ben Silbermann
Museums should no longer concern themselves with history on a grand scale, the sagas of kings and heroes, or the forging of national identities; they should focus instead on the lives and belongings of ordinary people, just as modern novels do.
~ Orhan Pamuk
He had brought no possessions with him; he would take none away. There were none to have--everything of value was in the school computer or his own head and hands.
~ Orson Scott Card
Each evening, I ached for the shelter of my tent, for the smallest sense that something was shielding me from the entire rest of the world, keeping me safe not from danger, but from vastness itself. I loved the dim, clammy dark of my tent, the cozy familiarity of the way I arranged my few belongings all around me each night.
~ Cheryl Strayed
I looked around. This house only the night before had been a home, and serves as a storage locker for memories that I could barely remember and a bunch of things I'd rather forget.
~ Laurie Notaro
I am certain that over the course of your own life, you have noticed that people's rooms reflect their personalities. In my room, for instance, I have gathered a collection of objects that are important to me, including a dusty accordion on which I can play a few sad songs, a large bundle of notes on the activities of the Baudelaire orphans, and a blurry photograph, taken a very long time ago, of a woman whose name is Beatrice. These are items that are very precious and dear to me.
~ Lemony Snicket
Excuse me, but I believe you have mistaken my home for your own, and my valuable belongings for yours, and I must ask you to return the items in question to me, and leave my home, after untying me from this chair, as I am unable to do it myself, if it's not too much trouble.
~ Lemony Snicket
I have been going to Italy since 1980, but I always went to do work. I did not live overseas, because I do not like running around with everything I own in a paper bag.
~ Bill Dixon
A home should be an intimate autobiography of the things that you like. One of the things I'm so keen on expressing is that, if you don't do it for yourself, if you're always seeking affirmation from outside, you'll never have a home. It'll just be a house.
~ Alexandra Stoddard
She [Cayce Pollard] feels the things she herself owns as a sort of pressure. Other people's objects exert no pressure. Margot thinks that Cayce has weaned herself from materialism, is preternaturally adult, requiring no external tokens of self.
~ William Gibson
A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house.
~ William James
Rakhi likes the comfortable clutter of her life, the things she loves gathered around her like a shawl against the winterliness of the world.
~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Wandering among the cardboard boxes, Vivian trails her fingertips across the tops of them, peering at their cryptic labels: The store, 1960–. The Nielsens. Valuables. "I suppose this is why people have children, isn't it?" she muses. "So somebody will care about the stuff they leave behind.
~ Christina Baker Kline
His glasses, carefully folded, placed in my mum's outstretched hand. His coat. An envelope. His watch. His shoes. And when we left, clutching a plastic bag with his belongings, the clouds were still there,
~ Helen Macdonald
And when we left, clutching a plastic bag with his belongings, the clouds were still there, a frieze of motionless cumulus over the Thames flat as a matte painting on glass.
~ Helen Macdonald
All that you've loved is all you own
~ Tom Waits
Two blue jackets, sir, one pea jacket, two pair of blue trousers, two pair of shoes, six shirts, four pairs of stockings, two Guernsey frocks, two hats, two black Barcelona handkerchiefs, a comforter, several pair of flannel . . .' he blushed and in a low voice said 'drawers. And two waistcoats; as well as one bed, one pillow, two blankets and two hammocks
~ Patrick O'Brian
They were not much to look at, he reflected, as the whip from the yardarm hoisted up their meagre belongings: three or four were decidedly simple, and two others had that indefinable air of men of some parts whose cleverness sets them apart from their fellows, but not nearly so far as they imagine.
~ Patrick O'Brian
By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings. But it is the desperateness of losing which picks the flowers of memory, binds the bouquet.
~ Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
bag on a strap over her shoulder that she had owned since she was nineteen. But somehow
~ Danielle Steel
appurtenances
~ Hilary Mantel
Mere rest was no longer enough, and I didn't think I could face the couch again anyway. So I did the only thing I could, the last pitiful choice left to me in this world of pain and dwindling options. I left the lobby and stood outside beside what had once been my room, standing in a miserable bovine stupor until forensics finally finished. Then I went in and put on a shirt, grabbed my few sad belongings, and used my phone to call a cab.
~ Jeff Lindsay
a pound or two of short dips; a crown, set with diamonds and rubies each as big as a duck's egg; a cradle — empty, an affecting sight; carpets, kettles, and pots; a stretcher; a chariot; a bunch of carrots; a costermonger's barrow; banners; a leg of mutton, and a baby. Everything, in short, that could possibly be wanted, either in a palace or a garret, a farmyard or a battle-field.
~ Jerome K. Jerome
Our homes become like photo albums of the past. But these "photos" aren't images that take up little space in a photo album or zero physical space on a computer. They're items of furniture and wood carvings and cars and blankets and clothes. These memory objects can take up lots of room in your home. This is space you can't fill with useful, functional items or new memory-associated items.
~ Peter Walsh