Beryl Bainbridge Quotes

I'd rather be in a tent than in a house.

As for the complex ways of living, I love them not, however much I practice them. In as many places as possible, I will get my feet down to the earth.

I'm a minimalist. I don't really need much to enjoy a good holiday - just my family and the bare essentials.

If I could choose, I'd be bare feet with animals all around me and living in a tree house. Like Tarzan and Jane, that's my dream. I'm at my happiest around nature.

Reducing your life down to three pairs of jeans, two skirts, a couple of shirts, and a few pairs of shoes was so nice for me. I really loved living in this tiny room where I didnt have space for anything. It sounds really lame, but it made me feel a lot more free, because I just didnt have as many choices.

It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly, that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety.

One learns first of all in beach living the art of shedding; how little one can get along with, not how much.

It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.

Moby lives the simplest of any person I think I know.

I don't need 15 houses. Owning real estate doesn't mean much to me. I don't like to think about things like that. I don't need 12 boats, or even the world's largest boat with a crew of 80. I'd have to take care of them, to worry about them. I get a lot more fun out of life without all the bells and whistles.

I’ve stripped my life down,” he told me. “I don’t need much. I have all the company I want to keep right in here.” He shot himself in the head with his fingers. “People don’t understand about the need to live simply. They make appointments all day. They even schedule their own deaths. The first time they’ll have freedom to really be themselves is when they no longer exist. But up here, there’s nothing but me and the sky. A million billion stars.

Free men must live simple lives and have simple pleasures.

I prefer to live in a rented house. No ties. Nothing around my neck. Just the minimum kind of bare comforts of home.

Give to me the life I love, Let the lave go by me, Give the jolly heaven above And the byway nigh me. Bed in the bush with the stars to see, Bread I dip in the river There's the life for a man like me, There's the life for ever.

What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other. Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature.

I've been able to see the world many times over. The thing I've learned is less is more. I travel as light as possible. I try to carry on.

It's great not to be a collector.

I like to keep my surroundings low-key. I don't need much around me. I'm easy don't need a lot of racket.

Go out in the woods, go out. If you don't go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.

We have very little, so we have nothing to be preoccupied with. The more you have, the more you are occupied, the less you give. But the less you have, the more free you are.

The importance of detachment from things, the importance of poverty, is that we are supposed to be free from things that we might prefer to people. Wherever things have become more important than people, we are in trouble. That is the crux of the whole matter.

I have emerged victorious from my thirty years of struggle. I have freed mankind from superfluous ornament.

With greater completeness and abstraction, I have attained a form filtered to its essentials.

A man in a cave or in a camp, a nomad, will die with no more estate than the wolf or the horse leaves.

Yeah, I guess I'm economical. Not because I try, but because I'm really not that interested in shoes.