Clutter Control Quotes

Really living without clutter takes an iron will ... This involves eternal watchfulness and that oldest and most relentless of the housewife's occupations, picking up. I have a feeling that picking up will go on long after ways have been found to circumvent death and taxes.

For every new thing that I buy, I have to throw something out.

More and more of us feel like emergency-room physicians, permanently on call, required to heal ourselves but unable to find the prescription for all the clutter on our desk.

Kids are messy!

The biscuit tin shouldn't be handy - move it about a bit. Try to keep it out of the way.

Too often I find that the volume of paper expands to fill the available briefcases.

If you have debt I'm willing to bet that general clutter is a problem for you too.

I am so organized that it's dysfunctional. Everything has a place. I am a very visual person, so my environment is important to me. If my environment is messy, I can't think clearly. I don't like clutter. A clean desk is a clean mind for me.

I really like keeping my kitchen counters as clear as possible. I tend to function better when there's less clutter.

There are persons who are never easy unless they are putting your books and papers in order--that is, according to their notions of the matter--and hide things lest they should be lost, where neither the owner nor anybody else can find them. This is a sort of magpie faculty. If anything is left where you want it, it is called litter. There is a pedantry in housewifery, as well as in the gravest concerns. Abraham Tucker complained that whenever his maid servant had been in his library, he could not see comfortably to work again for several days.

If you've had something for more than six months, and it's still not repaired, it's clutter.

I can't stand having a messy purse, and it makes me anxious to watch other people dig through their messy purses (especially if it's an expensive designer bag! Don't treat your Chanel like a trash can).

The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located.

I don't actually keep the dresses I've worn during other friends' weddings. Closets are small in New York City - I can't be squandering space on bridesmaid dresses.

Do I need fifty finger-painted pictures by my toddler, or is one enough to capture this time of life? Mementos work best when they're carefully chosen - and when they don't take up much room!

I just want to make lunches and organize my kids' playroom.

I have everything in my house organized to an unnecessary T, and I love it! The only downside: I have no excuses for losing my to-do lists.

One of my key realizations about happiness, and a point oddly under-emphasized by positive psychologists, given its emphasis in popular culture, is that outer order contributes to inner calm. More than it should.

There are certain parts of the home that I think embellishment feels cozy and inviting. Then there are other environments, for example, the living room, where I don't have a ton of items on the table.

But I never cleaned thoroughly enough, my reorganization proved to be haphazard, the disgraces came unfailingly to light, and it was clear how we failed, how disastrously we fell short of that ideal of order and cleanliness, household decency which I as much as anybody else believed in.

I'm super organized, but a horrible house cleaner.

I have a living room full of clothes. It's insane.

There's nothing wrong with having a collection, but it becomes a problem when it overwhelms your space. When you're not displaying it properly, you're not enjoying it and it turns into clutter.

Domesticity has to mean nesting. Otherwise, six months go by, and you don't know where your underwear is.

For a while, gently bumping into my nightstand meant a pile of 50 books clattering onto my head and the floor. After the 10th time this happened, I moved most of the books to a shelf in the spare room. Now, my nightstand is sort of like a bookish country club. And not all books get in.