Homelessness Quotes

“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“Home's where you go when you run out of homes.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

“Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.”
― Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood

“Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.

It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“She might be without country, without nation, but inside her there was still a being that could exist and be free, that could simply say I am without adding a this, or a that, without saying I am Indian, Guyanese, English, or anything else in the world.”
― Sharon Maas, Of Marriageable Age

“Sometimes it's easy to walk by because we know we can't change someone's whole life in a single afternoon. But what we fail to realize it that simple kindness can go a long way toward encouraging someone who is stuck in a desolate place.”
― Mike Yankoski

“I wasn't going to have enough money to pay for a Good Lifestyle, which meant I'd feel ashamed, which meant I'd get depressed, and that was the big one because I knew what that did to me: it made it so I wouldn't get out of bed, which led to the ultimate thing—homelessness. If you can't get out of bed for long enough, people come and take your bed away.”
― Ned Vizzini, It's Kind of a Funny Story

“Bleak, dark, and piercing cold, it was a night for the well-housed and fed to draw round the bright fire, and thank God they were at home; and for the homeless starving wretch to lay him down and die. Many hunger-worn outcasts close their eyes in our bare streets at such times, who, let their crimes have been what they may, can hardly open them in a more bitter world.”
― Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

“My life was a wandering; I never had a homeland. It was a matter of being constantly tossed about, without rest; nowhere and never did I find a home.”
― Jan Amos Komenský, Labyrint světa a ráj srdce

“Ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin.”
― Marlene Dietrich

“If ever you do go back, what is it you want of Evesham?"

"Do I know? [...] The silence, it might be ... or the stillness. To have no more running to do ... to have arrived, and have no more need to run. The appetite changes. Now I think it would be a beautiful thing to be still.”
― Ellis Peters, A Rare Benedictine

“A castaway in the sea was going down for the third time when he caught sight of a passing ship. Gathering his last strength, he waved frantically and called for help. Someone on board peered at him scornfully and shouted back, "Get a boat!”
― Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure

“Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. A futon. A bed. But I never did. If I let him inside I would become him, the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up. The slogan on the side of a moving company truck read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING PLACES--modified by a vandal or a disgruntled employee to read TOGETHER WE ARE GOING DOWN. If I went to the drowning man the drowning man would pull me under. I couldn't be his life raft.”
― Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

“The homeless people’s suffering belongs to amusement of our political order under a game over the right of marginalised group being transformed into citizens for merely punishment and humiliation. The Public Space Protection Orders is a penalty over one’s condition suffering – it is a fine over the disempowered for being disempowered. This act allows power to fragment the homeless into sub-humans punishable for the state of utter misery.”
― Bruno De Oliveira

“It's better to have nothing,' the children were saying.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“The image titled “The Homeless, Psalm 85:10,” featured on the cover of ELEMENTAL, can evoke multiple levels of response. They may include the spiritual in the form of a studied meditation upon the multidimensional qualities of the painting itself; or an extended contemplation of the scripture in the title, which in the King James Bible reads as follows: “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” The painting can also inspire a physical response in the form of tears as it calls to mind its more earth-bound aspects; namely, the very serious plight of those who truly are homeless in this world, whether born into such a condition, or forced into it by poverty or war.”
― Aberjhani, Elemental: The Power of Illuminated Love

“Poverty is what you see in the eyes of a Black child living in the squatter camp.Matsime Simon Mohapi”
― Matsime Simon Mohapi, Poverty in the Land of Riches - South Africa

“Homelessness is illegal. In my city no one is homeless although there are an increasing number of criminals living on the street. It was smart to turn an abandoned class into a criminal class, sometimes people feel sorry for the down and outs, they never feel sorry for criminals, it has been a great stabilizer.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Art and Lies

“A new remote and unfamiliar place can make the prior remote and unfamiliar place seem like home.”
― Jennifer Egan, The Candy House

“My grandfather was a railroad brakeman, sixty years with the D&H. I'd sit on his lap when I was little, I remember, at the upstairs apartment on Watkins Avenue in Oneonta overlooking the tracks, and we'd look out at the yard together and watch the trains hooking up, and he'd pull his gold watch out of his vest pocket and squint at the dial, a gold pocket watch, and the bulging surface of the watch case was all scritch-scratched, etched with tiny soft lines, hundreds of tiny scratches, interlaced. And then he'd check the yard, my Grandpa, to see if the trains were running on time. In those days there was a rhythm to everything, there was an order to things, but now we're riding a runaway train that's carrying us all away to that final night where nothing is remembered and nothing matters.”
― Donald O'Donovan, Night Train

“Sleep, ladies. I will be your St. Florian." Tomaso”
― Eileen Granfors, Some Rivers End on the Day of the Dead

“The value of homelessness is that it makes you value your home.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“It is easier to blame and stigmatise the women sleeping in doorways than it is too over them help.”
― Bekki Perriman, Doorways: Women, Homelessness, Trauma and Resistance

“Smelled like home. Stink permeates homelessness: the smell of trash, the smell of dirty streets, of fire bins and piss and other people's body odor, the wet dog smell that saturates your clothes and bedding, the smell of rust and dirt and decay.”
― Duncan Ralston, Where the Monsters Live

“Vagrants huddled in doorways, their hands tucked into their armpits, hats pulled down low, like sleeping birds. But they were city birds, dull in plumage and faded into their corners.”
― Byrd Nash, Ghost Talker

“That's one thing people don't really realize about homelessness—the hours of nothing to do, the never-ending, soul-sucking boredom that's only punctuated by the scramble to survive.”
― Jennifer Cody, The Trouble With Trying to Save an Assassin

“My experience of life always includes losing the things that are mine or having them forcibly taken away and being thrown away myself. I wasn’t wanted as a child, I skipped from foster home to foster home, never staying long enough to get settled, and then I aged out of the system into homelessness. I’ve never gotten to keep anything for long—not even friends or family; death has taken all of those types of people away from me—and the worry that I’m about to lose everything I’ve gained since meeting Fox has been hanging out in the back of my head, taking up space, living rent-free.”
― Jennifer Cody, The Trouble With Trying to Save an Assassin

“It feels like a war sometimes, thinks Judy, looking around the room where the clients are sleeping, eating or just staring into space. The homeless are like the remnants of some long-forgotten army, still dressed in their ragged uniforms, reminding their more fortunate neighbors that there is a battlefield out there, a place of violence and fear and dread. This knowledge is hard to take sometimes; you can see it in the faces of people who cross the street to avoid someone begging. But is being made to feel uncomfortable enough reason to kill?”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“Friendship is being there to notice someone's about to fall, to try to keep them from falling, to catch them when they fall or to cushion the blow when they do, to feel what they're feeling, and to understand why they feel that way.”
― Lisa Fipps, And Then, Boom!