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Homelessness Quotes

Browse 410 quotes about Homelessness.

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Homelessness Quotes

“She tried to remember all the times she had spoken to him. She replayed every moment she could remember at the beach last week. Not once had she led him to believe that she liked him improperly. And yet, last night, he had appeared as if she had invited him. She had given herself so willingly, so lasciviously, that he must have thought she had desired him all along. Perhaps she had, or perhaps she had not realised how pleasurable intimacy could be.”

LoveHomePastWomenMemoriesHistoryFeminismFutureRootsLeavingMemoryIntimacyUncertaintyMoving OnAttachmentBelongingHomelessnessReminiscenceSingapore LiteratureSglitIreadbooksactuallyAnchoringBooksactuallySglitftwMath Paper PressRain Tree
Book:Rain Tree
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“Although both home and mental illness are complex, modern ideas, we have fallen into the habit of using phrases such as "housing the homeless" and "treating the mentally ill" as if we knew what counts as housing a homeless person or what it means to treat mental illness. But we do not. We have deceived ourselves that having a home and being mentally healthy are our natural conditions, and that we become homeless or mentally ill as a result of "losing" our homes or our minds. The opposite is the case. We are born without a home and without reason, and have to exert ourselves and are fortunate if we succeed in building a secure home and a sound mind.”

HomeMental HealthMental IllnessHomelessness
Book:Cruel Compassion: Psychiatric Control of Society's Unwanted
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“We are homeless enough in this world under the best of circumstances without going to any special effort to test our capacity to be more so.”

HomeTravelHomelessHomelessnessLost GenerationAbroad
Book:The Confessions of a Harvard Man : The Street I Know Revisited: A Journey Through Literary Bohemia, Paris & New York in the 20's & 30's
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“That was our first home. Before I felt like an island in an ocean, before Calcutta, before everything that followed. You know it wasn’t a home at first but just a shell. Nothing ostentatious but just a rented two-room affair, an unneeded corridor that ran alongside them, second hand cane furniture, cheap crockery, two leaking faucets, a dysfunctional doorbell, and a flight of stairs that led to, but ended just before the roof (one of the many idiosyncrasies of the house), secured by a sixteen garrison lock, and a balcony into which a mango tree’s branch had strayed. The house was in a building at least a hundred years old and looked out on a street and a tenement block across it. The colony, if you were to call it a colony, had no name. The house itself was seedy, decrepit, as though a safe-keeper of secrets and scandals. It had many entries and exits and it was possible to get lost in it. And in a particularly inspired stroke of whimsy architectural genius, it was almost invisible from the main road like H.G. Wells’ ‘Magic Shop’. As a result, we had great difficulty when we had to explain our address to people back home. It went somewhat like this, ‘... take the second one from the main road….and then right after turning left from Dhakeshwari, you will see a bird shop (unspecific like that, for it had no name either)… walk straight in and take the stairs at the end to go to the first floor, that’s where we dwell… but don’t press the bell, knock… and don't walk too close to the cages unless you want bird-hickeys…’’ ('Left from Dhakeshwari')”

HomeHomelessnessReminiscence
Author:Kunal Sen
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“I do not deny that, to most, homelessness is a curse. Just look at some of the people in this room. The smell of urine, alcohol, and dirt is overwhelming. They have lost their dignity. Winter is on the doorstep. No hygiene will lead to certain disaster! But I suppose that Marduk does not care for them any longer. In a world where life is measured in monetary terms, those with no earnings are at the bottom of the chain. Their life is worth nothing. There is something surreal about it, don’t you think?!” He paused chewing his bottom lip, lost in reflection. “And yet, even those with money are not much better off. This summer I spent my days in a park, watching the same people rush from the station to work every morning. I am certain that they do not notice the flowers bloom in spring and that, to them, most of the world is no more than a shadow. I used to be them once, but not anymore.” “Are you happy?” asked Shane without judgement, not wanting to make any assumptions. “Happy?! I don’t know. But I am free and I am alive. There are those who resent not being seen, and I suppose that our invisibility, compounded by the thousands of people who pass us on the street every day without looking into our eyes, is indeed a symptom of something being wrong with our society. But I do not mind it. I would rather be out of a system designed to enslave me. This is my pilgrimage; like a monk, I have abandoned my old life in search of myself.” He paused and studied Shane. “You are young, the road ahead of you is still long. Certain lessons can only be learned with experience.”

HappinessTimeValueHomelessness
Book:Darkness
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“I do not deny that, to most, homelessness is a curse. Just look at some of the people in this room. The smell of urine, alcohol, and dirt is overwhelming. They have lost their dignity. Winter is on the doorstep. No hygiene will lead to certain disaster! But I suppose that Marduk does not care for them any longer. In a world where life is measured in monetary terms, those with no earnings are at the bottom of the chain. Their life is worth nothing. There is something surreal about it, don’t you think?!”

HappinessTimeValueHomelessness
Book:Darkness
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“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies... If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations [in the most general sense of the word] that will grow up around the banks ... will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered ... The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”

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Author:Thomas Jefferson, speaking in opposition to the recharter of the Bank Bill (1809)
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“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.”

LossAbandonmentHomelessness
Book:The Trouble With Trying to Save an Assassin
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“Transparent tubes divided Phil’s blood into shades of red, fading to straw colored plasma. I watched his fluid swirl past his shoulders and disappear into machines. He offered himself to blood banks all over the city, his plasma rushed to hospitals where it would circulate through other people’s bodies. The map of my love’s tapped arteries would look like a bloodshot eye over the city of Albuquerque. His blood bought us dinner. I dreamed he was my mother, and I nursed his arm. I wrote a poem about it, how I suckled his arm dry like a sore teat.”

LoveMarriageBloodHungerMemoirHomelessness
Book:Dreaming in Night Vision: A Story in Vignettes
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“This capacity for living easily and familiarly at an extraordinary level of abstraction is the source of modern man's power. With it he has transformed the planet, annihilated space, and trebled the world's population. But it is also a power which has, like everything human, its negative side, in the desolating sense of rootlessness, vacuity, and the lack of concrete feeling that assails modern man in his moments of real anxiety.”

PowerProgressAnxietyMeaningControlFeelingAbstractionAlienationHomelessnessModernityMeaninglessnessConcreteness
Book:Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy
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“His body had become a companion which seemed always about to leave him: it had its own pains which moved him to pity, and its own particular movements which he tried hard to follow. He had learned from it how to keep his eyes down on the road, so that he could see no one, and how important it was never to look back - although there were times when memories of an earlier life filled him with grief and he lay face down upon the grass until the sweet rank odour of the earth brought him to his senses. But slowly he forgot where it was he had come from, and what it was he was escaping.”

Mental IllnessHomelessHomelessnessHomeless PeopleVagrant
Book:Hawksmoor
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“There were some places, and streets, where he did not venture since he had learnt that others had claims there greater than his own - not the gangs of meths drinkers who lived in no place and no time, nor the growing number of the young who moved on restlessly across the face of the city, but vagrants like himself who, despite the name which the world has given them, had ceased to wander and now associated themselves with one territory or 'province' rather than another. All of them led solitary lives, hardly moving from their own warren of streets and buildings: it is not known whether they chose the area, or whether the area itself had callen them and taken them in, but they had become the guardian spirits (as it were) of each place. Ned now knew some of their names: Watercress Joe, who haunted the streets by St Mary Woolnoth, Black Sam who lived and slept beside the Commercial Road between Whitechapel and Limehouse, Harry the Goblin who was seen only by Spitalfields and Artillery Lane, Mad Frank who walked continually through the streets of Bloomsbury, Italian Audrey who was always to be found in the dockside area of Wapping (it was she who had visited Ned in his shelter many years before), and 'Alligator' who never moved from Greenwich.”

LondonHomelessHomelessnessHomeless PeopleGreenwichWhitechapelBloomsburyVagrantWappingLimehouseSpitalfields
Book:Hawksmoor
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“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.”

HomelessHomelessnessSurveillanceCriminalityPolicingCriminalizationUnhousedCriminalization Of Homelessness
Book:Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
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“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.”

HomelessnessHomeless In AmericaModern Day American Culture
Book:Night Train
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“A homeless guy lifts a bread out of hunger, it's called burglary, but a cool-looking guy rips off an entire population, while spreading disparities wider than ever, it's called entrepreneurship. What a world! What a pathetic world!”

EconomicsHomelessnessSocial ReformEconomic DisparityBusiness EthicsBillionairesCorporate Social ResponsibilityTax The RichWealth TaxSuper Rich
Book:High Voltage Habib: Gospel of Undoctrination
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“The city had not yet woken on the frigid Sunday morning of February 20, 2011, when the body of a young Irish woman was found outside St. Brigid's Church in Manhattan's East Village. The news reports cited alcoholism, homelessness, and hypothermia as contributing factors in her death. They said that earlier that month, on St. Brigid's feast day she had turned thirty-five years old. They said she wanted to be an artist. They said her name was Grace Farrell.”

TraumaExileAlcoholismHomelessnessIntergenerational TraumaIrish ImmigrantSt Brigid
Book:In Ordinary Time: Fragments of a Family History
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“The atmosphere inside was terrible. Brenda stared into the distance whenever I was around her and hardly spoke to me. Little Jim passed me in the hall “you shouldn’t have done that” he said without malice. Was he scared too? Why was everyone scared? What didn’t I know? I walked into the kitchen “Hi Brenda, what should I do now I’m late for tea?” I asked her honestly. “You can do whatever you choose Tracie” she said staring through the kitchen window. It kind of reminded me of my first memory of mum. I was shocked she sounded like she really didn’t care. She wasn’t even fake caring any more she just plain didn’t give a shit. “Thanks” I said and walked towards the living room where Caroline and Rita were sat. Rita got up and walked past me to go to bed. “What’s going on?” I said to Caroline. “We didn’t know where you were” she said shaking her head at me. Did nobody get it?”

AdoptionAlcoholismHomelessnessKillerFoster CareBad FathersSurvivor StoriesAbuse StoriesKids In Care
Book:Tracie's Story: Care Abuse Love Murder
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