I have the world’s largest collection of seashells. I keep it on all the beaches of the world. Perhaps you’ve seen it.
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy.
His rage passes description — the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk who have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted.
Possessions possess.
I go about looking at horses and cattle. They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young. I am sick with envy of them.
The only reason a great many American families don’t own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments.
American business, while it does not frown on helping the human race, frowns on people who start right in helping the human race without first proving that they can sell things to it.
Oh, for the good old days when people would stop Christmas shopping when they ran out of money.
The more you have, the more you want / And almost weigh down the universe.
The marvelous thing about human beings is that we are perpetually reaching for the stars. The more we have, the more we want. And for this reason, we never have it all.
I have cakes of soap that I bought twenty-five years ago, still in their wrappers, and I am saving them in the perfect confidence that the right day will come to unwrap each one and use it. And there are probably a hundred books downstairs in the library that I am eager to read, have been eager to read for years, yet refuse to read until the day comes, the day that says to me: This is the morning to start Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, or George Borrow, or Psichari, or someone else. Now, in my logical mind, I know quite well that these promised days are not likely ever to arrive: I shall never use those old cakes of soap that are stored in the linen closet, and I am reasonably sure of never reading Romany Rye, because it doesn’t interest me. But there is that other person, the ideal one that I ought to be, whom it does interest, and it comforts me to think that those things are waiting for him.
I am what is mine. Personality is the original personal property.
I have had a very thin time of it these days. My money ran out on Thursday, and I have lived for four days on twenty-three cups of coffee.
There is one advantage to having nothing; it never needs repair.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Why grab possessions like thieves, or divide them like socialists, when you can ignore them like wise men?
Mine! There isn’t any such thing as mine. The world slips slithering through my fingers.
The things that are ours cannot be given away, or taken away, or lost. We break our hearts, all of us, trying to keep things that do not belong to us — and to which we have no right.
Enough is as good as a feast.
