Decluttering At The Speed Of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle With Stuff Quotes
"I've learned how to get rid of things even though I wanted to keep them all. I've learned to like living my life with only things that make it better."
"Following the steps in this book won't be dramatic... but you will make progress every time you follow the steps."
"This book is for the person who is ready to declutter."
"Living for now became my new goal: living in the house we have, in the city where we are, and in the moment when we’re alive."
"Once I understood the purpose of containers, I was freed from my overthinking."
"I love opening a kitchen cabinet and realizing I love being able to reach inside and grab exactly what I needed without shifting and looking behind something else."
"Decluttering isn’t Stuff Shifting. It isn’t rearranging or buying a new shelving unit or sorting into slots or drawers or baskets."
"Once I started looking at the size of the scarf shelf as the limit to how many scarves I could keep, I made progress. Immediately."
"I didn’t decide anything. I didn’t figure out anything. I just accepted that limits were limits."
"As I got rid of obviously worthless stuff, I started realizing I loved something else. I loved space."
"The best way for me to get stuff out of my house quickly, and without emotional hassle, is to donate."
"I know because they work for me and for people with lives very different from mine."
"The more I focused on the future instead of the present, the more I justified collecting things I might need one day."
"I didn’t understand that my overabundance of stuff was directly related to my inability to function well in my home."
"I am not willing to pay ten dollars a month to store stuff I don’t use and not be able to walk into the walk-in closet I originally agreed to pay ten dollars a month to have."
"It’s better to live without something you might use than to have something you don’t use."
"Maybes are nos. What-ifs become let’s-assume-probably-nots."
"Mind-set. That’s what this is. A change in my perspective."
"The definition of decluttering is getting rid of things I don’t need."
"A home free of clutter, where everyday living is easy and enjoyable."
"Getting started was hard because of the sheer volume of work that would be required."
"When I declutter, I feel happy as things leave my home."
"The things I love have room to breathe, and this lets me breathe as well."
"The point of decluttering isn’t to get rid of things you want to keep; it’s to identify those things and then to make space to enjoy those things."
"There’s a difference between something being useful and actually using something."
"I have to create strategies that don’t depend on me being able to predict how much time I have to give."
"Decluttering perfectly is an unattainable dream for people like me."
"Every home is different, but the same steps work no matter the clutter."
"To declutter at the speed of life, you have to accept that life happens."
"As long as the take-it-there-now principle is followed, the mess gets smaller."
"I used to wait for each day off to declutter, but those came and went without making significant progress."
"Decluttering strategies, in order, for whatever amount of time you have available will result in less stuff in your home."
"I still sometimes find myself staring into a space and wishing with every wishbone in my body that I could just pretend the mess didn’t exist."
"You’re overwhelmed. I get it. I totally get it."
"If you are confident you have nothing unwearable in your closet, yay for you. Look anyway."
"Immediate decision #1: I’m going to keep doing my own laundry like I’ve been doing for the past almost-thirty years."
"Easy stuff might be coats someone hung in this closet even though you have an established coat closet elsewhere."
"Look for _Duh_s. _Duh_s are clothes that aren’t unwearable but that you know for a fact you’ll never wear."
"The two decluttering questions don’t work as well for clothing as they do for other things."
"I accepted that useful things can most definitely be clutter."
"Creating a laundry routine helped me gain a realistic understanding of how many clothes we had."
"I keep things that make people think I’m crazy too."
"The container decides how much you can keep. You decide what you keep."
"Make the room usable. Usable for crafting. Which involves much more than paper."
"Running out of clean clothes made me do panic-stricken, frantic emergency loads of laundry."
"Once the drawer is full, any paper that doesn’t fit in the drawer goes in the Donate Box."
"If your hobby is something you do consistently, it deserves space in your home."
"Your instincts don’t matter if you don’t live there."
"What do you do with nonwearable things? Note: decisions like this cause people like me to hyperventilate."
"I dread decluttering storage areas. It’s my least favorite kind of project."
"But as I decluttered, found my Clutter Threshold, and experienced how much easier life was with less stuff."
"My thinking (if I stopped to think about it) went like this: Clothing is useful. I have to have it."
"You cannot control another person. And in a good marriage, you shouldn’t want to control the other person."
"My mother’s best marriage advice was to never say 'I told you so.'"
"If you can’t communicate kindly when it comes to clutter, there’s most likely a communication problem that’s about more than just clutter."
"Do what you can, whenever you can, as often as you can."
"But if you read the previous chapters and thought, I wish someone would come and help me like this, let me be honest about your role as the helpee."
"The physical act of purging clutter will cause alarm bells to go off in your head as you see the future of the item in your hand."
"For years, I assumed my next house would cure my clutter issues. For years, I was wrong."
"Doing the easy stuff changed my thought processes. My attachments changed. My view of my stuff changed."
"Honestly, the only time I can think of when it all actually has to go is when you’re dead."
"The hardest part of giving yourself permission to walk through the stages of grief is knowing that you will come through the stages different than you are now."