I’ve been knitting since I was in elementary school (that’s a very long time ago!). In all those years I’ve accumulated quite a lot of knitting needles. And I think I still have all of them, including broken ones!
I started on colorful aluminum Boye straight needles, and still have them all, not all complete pairs, of course. A couple of them are bent badly — I’ve apparently blocked out the episode where that occurred!
I went through a Bernat Aero phase in the years I lived in New Mexico. I lived in a funky little adobe house converted to apartments right off the downtown plaza, and had no car. Luckily it was a smallish town and I was young — my scoliosis wasn’t evident yet, and I walked everywhere I wanted 
to go. There was a sweet little yarn shop on the plaza, and the owner suggested I try the lovely gray needles. They were so different from the Boyes…. I loved the texture and how they felt in my hands. Apparently my cats enjoyed the texture also — a few are unusable because of the added “texture” consisting of tiny cat teeth marks.
The Crooked Yellow House 