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

“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

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

“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

“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

“اس دنیا میں بڑی مشکل ہے لیکن خانہ بدوشوں کیلئے تو یہاں اور بھی مشکل ہے ۔ کھیتوں میں اُگے ہوئے پودوں کی طرح جو لوگ ایک ہی شہر یا گاؤں میں رہتے ہیں، وہ ایک دوسرے کو پہچانتے ہیں خوشی کی ہوا میں ایک ساتھ لہلہا کو سرسراتے ہیں گیت گاتے ہیں اور اونچے ہو جاتے ہیں ۔ بھوک کے پالے میں ایک ساتھ ٹھٹھرتے ہیں اور بیماری کی وبا میں ایک ساتھ گھر کر کٹ جاتے ہیں۔ لیکن خانہ بدوشوں کیلئے ہر جگہ مشکل ہے ۔ وہ ہر کھیت کے کنارے اجنبی ہیں اور سر گاؤں کی مد میں انجانے شہر کی گلی کا ہر سوڈان کیلئے ایک نیا خطرہ ہے اور ہر چوراہے کا ہر سنتری انھیں ہر وقت بے دخل کر سکتا ہے۔ وہ ہر جگہ اکیلے ہیں۔ یہ لوگ جو کسی قوم کسی مذہب کسی رنگ اور کسی ملک کے نہیں ہیں ۔ یا شاید یہ سب کے ہیں اس لئے کسی کے نہیں ہیں ان کے رنگ میں سب کا رنگ ہے۔ ان کے خون میں سب کا خون ہے اور ان کی زبان میں سب کچھ زبانیں ہیں۔ یہ لوگ جو اپنا خیمہ اپنی چٹائی، گھاس کے چند تنکے لئے گھومتے ہیں کسی آشیانے کی تلاش میں ہیں ؟ اپنی اس کاہش کا انجام انھیں خود معلوم نہیں”
― KRISHAN CHANDAR, AIK AURAT HAZAR DIWANE by KRISHAN CHANDAR ایک عورت ہزار دیوانے

“I believe in using my voice to stand up for what matters. (Texas HB 1925: Criminalizing Homelessness Is Not the Answer – blog)”
― Carlos Wallace

“Homelessness isn’t a reflection of individual failure; it’s a systemic issue rooted in decades of neglect in critical areas like affordable housing, mental health care, and education. (Texas HB 1925: Criminalizing Homelessness Is Not the Answer – blog)”
― Carlos Wallace

“We must stop treating homelessness as a crime and start addressing it for what it truly is: a solvable challenge that demands compassion, creativity, and commitment. (Texas HB 1925: Criminalizing Homelessness Is Not the Answer – blog)”
― Carlos Wallace

“Addressing homelessness demands thoughtful, compassionate action. (Texas HB 1925: Criminalizing Homelessness Is Not the Answer – blog)”
― Carlos Wallace

“The integration of policing and homeless services blurs the boundary between the maintenance of economic security and the investigation of crime, between poverty and criminality, tightening a net of constraint that tracks and traps the unhoused.”
― Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

“Homelessness is a serious issue in our country. We need to work together to do more to alleviate poverty”
― David Sikhosana

“A homeless person on the street is commonly ignored by everyone; people just walk past them busily, as if that person doesn't even exist. This might not even be intentional, because they are so preoccupied with themselves that they don't notice the presence of that person. But the irony is that it is these same people who "forbid themselves from feeling sad" through social media posts due to "somewhere in the world, people are dying of hunger.”
― Sov8840

“To occupy the time I talked with a rather superior tramp, a young carpenter who wore a collar and tie, and was on the road, he said, for lack of a set of tools. He kept a little aloof from the other tramps, and held himself more like a free man than a casual. He had literary tastes, too, and carried one of Scott’s novels on all his wanderings. He told me he never entered a spike unless driven there by hunger, sleeping under hedges and behind ricks in preference. Along the south coast he had begged by day and slept in bathing-machines for weeks at a time.
We talked of life on the road. He criticized the system which makes a tramp spend fourteen hours a day in the spike, and the other ten in walking and dodging the police. He spoke of his own case – six months at the public charge for want of three pounds’ worth of tools. It was idiotic, he said.
Then I told him about the wastage of food in the workhouse kitchen, and what I thought of it. And at that he changed his tune immediately. I saw that I had awakened the pew-renter who sleeps in every English workman. Though he had been famished along with the rest, he at once saw reasons why the food should have been thrown away rather than given to the tramps. He admonished me quite severely.
‘They have to do it,’ he said. ‘If they made these places too pleasant you’d have all the scum of the country flocking into them. It’s only the bad food as keeps all that scum away. These tramps are too lazy to work, that’s all that’s wrong with them. You don’t want to go encouraging of them. They’re scum.’
I produced arguments to prove him wrong, but he would not listen. He kept repeating:
‘You don’t want to have any pity on these tramps – scum, they are. You don’t want to judge them by the same standards as men like you and me. They’re scum, just scum.’
It was interesting to see how subtly he disassociated himself from his fellow tramps. He has been on the road six months, but in the sight of God, he seemed to imply, he was not a tramp. His body might be in the spike, but his spirit soared far away, in the pure aether of the middle classes.”
― George Orwell, Essays

“It was odd how everything had changed but was still the same. Not a single one of the old vines remained, not a single animal; what had been meadow was stubble, and what had been stubble was vineyard, people were gone, grown up, died.”
― Cesare Pavese, La luna e i falò