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"I'd begun at the soundless place where California touches Mexico with five Gatorade bottles full of water and eleven pounds of gear and lots of candy. My backpack was tiny, no bigger than a schoolgirl's knapsack. Everything I carried was everything I had."
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Exlpore more Minimalism quotes
"It was amazing how many books one could fit into a room, assuming one didn't want to move around very much."
"Light heat all known all white heart breath no sound."
"You don't need extra food, extra water, extra clothing for extra warmth " anything extra. You don't need soap or deodorant. Everything you carry you should need daily."
"There's been a lot written on the topic of minimalism. But I still believe in it."
"I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run."
"For myself I can say that, having had every good thing that money can buy, an experience like another, I could part without a pang with every possession I have. We live in uncertain times and our all may yet be taken from us. With enough plain food to satisfy my small appetite, a room to myself, books from a public library, pens and paper, I should regret nothing."
"Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being."
"Diogenes carried a bowl with him for years, but one day saw a man drinking from his cupped palm and declared, 'I have been a fool, burdened all these years by the weight of a bowl when a perfectly good vessel lay at the end of my wrist."
"Fewer the necessities, better your life will be."
Explore more quotes by Aspen Matis
"Helplessness didn't have to be my identity, I wasn't condemned to it. I was willing - able - to change. Our enmeshment had been enabled by my belief that I needed [my mom] to help me, to take care of things for me - and to save me - but, back in the home where I'd learned this helplessness, I found I no longer felt that I was trapped in it."
"Each year, Gracie Henderson moons a thousand strangers, collects their shocked faces in an annual photo album."
"I needed to begin respecting my own body's boundaries. I had to draw clear lines. Ones that were sound in my mind and therefore impermeable, and would always, no matter where I walked, protect me. Moving forward, I wanted rules."
"And so, despite the complex web of paths, waterfalls, cliffs, as a hiker wanders downhill, drainages merge, faint, abstract paths coalesce, thicken, until there is one path " the one, natural, trodden way."
"I had stripped naked in front of men. Drunk. In morning's somber brightness I tried to remember why I had done it. Total exposure had seemed like the only way to be seen more clearly, heard, but now it seemed the opposite: a wild act that would define me."
"If I wanted to go to bed at ten o'clock I did. If I wanted to go to bed at six p.m., I did. I woke at sunrise because the new sun lit my eyes. The sun was my clock; my body my pace-keeper. I started walking when I wanted, kept going until precisely when I wanted to stop.When I was tired, feeling like stopping but wanting to persist, I'd listen to Blood On The Tracks."
"My malady was submission.The symptom: my compliance.The antidote was loud clear boundaries."
"It finally had to.I understood that it wouldn't be easy, it would be very hard; I'd need to resist the habit I had developed long ago " with conviction. I'd have to be impolite, an inconvenience, and sometimes awkward. But if I could commit, all that discomfort would add up to zap predatory threats like a Taser gun. I'd stun them. They'd bow to me. I'd let my no echo against the mountains."
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