Claire Messud Quotes

People surround themselves in their houses with things they don't really need, that they have to dust all the time.

In New York, I live on a compost heap of all the stuff I accumulate.

The more storage you have, the more stuff you accumulate.

Wherever I go, stuff accumulates.

Unnecessary possessions are unnecessary burdens.

I'm always so surprised when people fill their homes up with stuff.

I would drown in objects if I didn't have the ability to photograph them.

The older I get, the less I obsess about material stuff. In fact, stuff has become the enemy. There always seems to be more of it than I have storage in my house!

Sometimes it's better to look at things than own them... owning means anxiety and lots of bags to carry around.

I've collected a lot of things throughout my life, and I think that's more being a hoarder than being passionate about them, and so I've tried to stop that.

Sometimes the weight of expectations, of doing anything, can be a little bit heavy.

I look about my house and see there are lots of lovely things in it, but I constantly buy more.

I don't collect things for the sake of collecting. I don't really see the point.

Life is one long struggle to disinter oneself, to keep one's head above the accumulations, the ever deepening layers of objects ... which attempt to cover one over, steadily, almost irresistibly, like falling snow.

If you own a rug you own too much.

Things. Cosas. Things attach themselves like leeches to the human soul, then they bleed out the sweetness and the music and the primordial joy of being unencumbered upon the land.

Houses are full of things that gather dust

We heap up around us things that we do not need as the crow makes piles of glittering pebbles.

Too often, a vast collection of possessions ends up possessing its owner.

A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.

Every thing, even the so-called timesaving device and energy-efficient machine, comes these days with an elaborate set of instructions for its care and feeding. Buying a machine has become more and more like buying a pet. ... We are time-crunched. Not just by the number of things we have to do, but the number of things we have. In the late twentieth century, things have become our new dependents.

We have, instead (of soot and dirt), disorganization. We have this proliferation of goods. It's the disease of the time.

Now there are heavy houses everywhere and more of them are being built. In fact, it is only when more houses are being constructed that some countries consider their economics healthy. Yet each house is a heavy footprint on the Earth. Just as all our possessions represent-if we cannot learn ways of sharing them-a weight and clutter that often means the faces of future generations will look up into darkness and the pressure on the Earth of "things."

The possession of a great many things, even the best of things, tends to blind one to the real value of anything.

I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.