Daniel Flanagan

“Over the seven years that I chipped away at this topic, I found hoarding to be a historically intricate lattice of worry about the unsuitable roles that household furnishings, mass-produced whatnots, curiosa, keepsakes, and clutter play in our daily lives. The majority of these apprehensions over the stuff of normal life originated in the twentieth century, and they are not so far removed from other cultural anxieties. As much as a hoard might be about depression and impulsivity and loss and misplaced stacks of paper, it is also about fears of working-class blacks in 1930s Harlem, post-1960s New Christian Right literatures, and emerging models of appropriate aging in the 1940s and 1950s. Though neglected in the current rhetoric of chronic savers, these unlikely sources each fed into definitions of HD.”
― Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture

“Last time I was down South, I walked into this restaurant. This white waitress came up to me and said, 'We don't serve colored people here.' I said, 'That's all right, I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.' About that time, these three cousins came in. You know the ones I mean, Ku, Klux and Klan. They said, 'Boy, we're givin' you fair warnin. Anything you do to that chicken, we're gonna do to you.'

"So I put down my knife and fork, picked up that chicken, and kissed it.”
― Dick Gregory, Nigger

“Makes you wonder. When I left St. Louis, I was making five dollars a night. Now I'm getting $5,000 a week — for saying the same things out loud I used to say under my breath.”
― Dick Gregory, From the Back of the Bus

“What counts as too much stuff? When do overflowing cardboard boxes spill into insanity? What is useless trash and what is valuable treasure?”
― Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture