“Obsessing about things isn’t good for you. It’s a form of possessing things and at some level of awareness; we possess nothing. That’s how we get free of being possessed by our possessions.”

“What is it about possessing things? Why do we feel the need to own what we love? And why do we become such jerks when we do? We've all been there. You want something, you possess it - and by possessing it, you lose it. ”

“We have possessed virtually nothing in our life in Italy. In England, I became increasingly sure that to possess something was to arrest your knowledge of it, because the thing itself is no longer free. For me the pain of knowledge is a tonic, an antidote to the pall of possession. But there is an element of death in knowledge (...) Knowledge is what remains to the human mind once the possession has been lost. It is the reliquary of the vanished object. Its presence is painful, because it signifies that what was known is no longer there.”

“All that is great cannot be possessed - and that is one of the most foolish things man goes on doing. We want to possess.”

“Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,Possessed by what we now no more possessed.”

“We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.”