Hoarding Quotes

“At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived.”
― Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

“Entrei numa livraria. Pus-me a contar os livros que há para ler e os anos que terei de vida. Não chegam! Não duro nem para metade da livraria! Deve haver certamente outras maneiras de uma pessoa se salvar, senão… estou perdido.”
― Almada Negreiros, A Invenção do Dia Claro

“When someone steals another's clothes, we call them a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does not? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor.”
― Basil the Great

“Your home is living space, not storage space.”
― Francine Jay

“Hoard food and it rots. Hoard money and you rot. Hoard power and the nation rots.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Adjustment Day

“We immortals aren't misers - we don't hoard! Such things are pointless.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

“Clutter may rob us of the life we imagined or prevent us from creating a new vision for our future.”
― Lisa J. Shultz, Lighter Living: Declutter. Organize. Simplify.

“Hoarding can never end, for the heart of man always covets for more, its raging appetites can only be quenched by the heavy sands of the grave.”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Book of Wisdom

“So why do we call her crazy for piling her trailer full of more cats than she could take care of but applaud when somebody accumulates more money than they can spend? They're both hoarders.”
― David Wong, Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits

“I felt that days, weeks, months, and years of my life were wasted by the removal of stuff. There were more important things I would rather have been doing. But I continued, and eventually, I felt lighter and freer than I had ever felt in the years of big houses with each room filled to the brim.”
― Lisa J. Shultz, Lighter Living: Declutter. Organize. Simplify.

“My choice of a lighter lifestyle has brought me a greater sense of well-being. In a world that often seems stressful and chaotic, that’s a feeling I cherish.”
― Lisa J. Shultz, Lighter Living: Declutter. Organize. Simplify.

“This is the restless cardboard box I carry from room to room, house to house filled with papers I do not know how to sort. How do you separate trash from trash? Everything looks like something else-something I just might need. Someday right?”
― Tiana Clark, I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood

“2020 is the year that black people became the center of the universe, white people got evicted from the human race, and buying toilet paper became the new gold rush.”
― Stewart Stafford

“What I don’t have gnaws at me until I get it. And once I get it, I forgot that I wanted it because it was not about the need to have whatever it was that I wanted. Rather, it was about getting rid of the insecurities surrounding the fact that I did not have it.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Hoarding is holding onto what I can’t keep and all the while convincing myself that I can. And in the end, what I’m really hoarding is my need to believe something at the expense of my existence.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“If possessing everything is the ‘everything’ of my existence, maybe losing everything is the only ‘thing’ that I really need right now.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“What's the difference between a private library and a book hoarder?' he wonders.
We are both silent before chuckling and answering in unison: 'Faeces.”
― Sarah Krasnostein, The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster

“It was the influence of the Great Depression, recycling, thriftiness, stocking up to the point of hoarding for fear of being without. ... She [Rhea Leen] remembered coming home from school before Jean [Billie Jean Parker] got off work to a cold, empty house, and finding only one can of soup in the cupboard, heating the soup and eating only half of it, saving the rest for he aunt. Rather remembered ... when her father took a job as a janitor because his savings had been wiped out in the crash of 1929 and there were no other jobs. He always distrusted banks thereafter, refusing to do business with them, preferring to bury his money in the yard. He was not alone.”
― John Neal Phillips, My Life with Bonnie and Clyde

“preparing before a crisis hits is responsible and selfless, but trying to accumulate necessary items during a crisis is an act of hoarding”
― Chris Martenson, Prosper!: How to Prepare for the Future and Create a World Worth Inheriting

“The joy of giving versus the sadness and loneliness of hoarding. There is no greater joy than that of giving and sharing. It is liberating. We can, after all, not take anything with us when we die and leave this earth behind.”
― Paddick Van Zyl

“like someone who obsessively collects paintings of hoarders”
― J.S. Mason, The Satyrist...And Other Scintillating Treats

“...honestly wealth is vapor now. It is concept more than it ever has been and the hoarding of British Empire diamonds in gold nests like an evil chipmunk is no longer considered a sign of taste and distinction.”
― Aidan Truhen, Seven Demons

“I hoard books. Books feel like home!”
― Avijeet Das

“2020 was the year of hoarding.”
― Steven Magee

“The more space they, hoarders, have available, the more space they fill. Perhaps this is actually the goal--to fill space.”
― Randy O. Frost, Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things

“... Whose forbidden hold was this?
What had he provoked? He wrapped trembling fingers around
the first small, shining thing he found, and fled. For the vault
was more than a treasury: piles of preciouses nested
beneath the coils of a snoring serpent. It was a bed.”
― Maria Dahvana Headley, Beowulf

“He didn't say, Uncluttered

is the privilege of the rich these days.
Or: In
a world of built-in obsolescence, saved

means saddled with.”
― Linda Gregerson, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep

“My trouble is
I always try to save
everything

old clocks and calendars
expired words buried
in open graves

But hoarded grains of sand
keep shifting as rivers
redefine boundaries and seasons”
― Naomi Long Madgett, Exits and Entrances

“The more material things that we possess, the less clear life becomes. Therefore, if you want clarity, have a garage sale.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“In his love for these peculiar places, he was like an anthropologist, or an accountant. i couldn't tell which, because I was never certain what lay beneath M's fascinations. Sometimes I imagined they were a sign of sorrow, a wish to care for and preserve things on the brink of disappearance. Other times, I thought that they were nothing more than a tedious desire to accumulate.”
― Aysegül Savas, Walking on the Ceiling