Quotes About Homelessness

When you look away from a homeless person, you diminish their humanity and your own.

Worrying causes us to be "all over the place," but seldom at home. One way to express the spiritual crisis of our time is to say that most of us have an address but cannot be found there. We know where we belong, but we keep being pulled away in many directions, as if we were still homeless. "All these other things" keep demanding our attention. They lead us so far from home that we eventually forget our true address, that is, the place where we can be addressed.

In the large towns and cities, where civilization especially prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live.

It's hard to know, when you're in such a jam, which is worse—not having a place to sleep or not having a place to work. One can sleep almost anywhere, but one must have a place to work. Even if it's not a masterpiece you're doing. Even a bad novel requires a chair to sit on and a bit of privacy.

I'm still working, I've got two arms, two legs, two gorgeous kids, a lovely wife. Fifteen years ago, I was homeless. So when you think about it, I'm lucky.

I've lived in so many different towns - Guttenberg, Union City, West New York, Jersey City. We didn't have a lot of money, and we'd get kicked out of places a lot.

I'd been living on the streets of New York, and I was sleeping at my friends' houses, sometimes in the subway.

When I got to New York, I had no place to sleep. The pay from 'Sesame Street' wasn't enough to rent an apartment. I was staying on people's couches. I stayed in the dressing room until they found out. I stayed with Jim Henson and his family for a week, and I wanted to do that permanently. I didn't dare ask, though.

I started working at a soup kitchen in skid row of Los Angeles when I was 13 years old, and the first day, I felt really scared. I was young, and it was rough and raw down there, and though I was with a great volunteer group, I just felt overwhelmed.

People can be so apathetic. They continue to ignore the real people trapped in poverty and homelessness. It's almost maddening.

For young people in the U.K. who find themselves without anywhere to live - perhaps they have left the family home after a relationship breakdown, or to escape abuse, or have left care - it is far too easy to become trapped in a chain of misfortune, with little help from the state.

I've lived out of my car for months with my two babies. I've seen my belongings in trash bags along my backseat.

Many times, I left the prison thinking, 'I'm smart. I can make it. I won't get caught up again.' But you get off downtown Skid Row, and you're a target for all of the environmental harms in that area. The pain and trauma in that area is so thick, you can almost reach your hand out and touch it.

It's the bedsit culture: people get a cat, and then, in a few months, when they move on or go travelling, they just throw the animal out. It's so discouraging.

We can find any number of ways to criminalise begging, but when we do so, aren't we attacking the problem from entirely the wrong angle? Banning begging or rough sleeping treats street homelessness as a lifestyle choice that can be discouraged through threats of legal action and heavy-handed policing.

Oscar Wilde said the rich and the poor are equal - they can both sleep under the bridge. Right? Do they have a right? You're damn right they have a right!

We ended up all living in a one-bedroom apartment that cost $80 a month and sleeping on the floor. My jacket was my first pillow. We really had nothing at all.

I've lived out in a park sleeping on the grass with no place to go; I've not eaten. I've been there.

When I came out, it didn't go well. My dad kicked me out. I ended up sleeping in my car.

I grew up poor in San Pedro, California, sleeping on the floor of shady motels with my five siblings and not always sure when or where I'd get my next meal.

Some people say that rough sleeping has always existed and always will - that there is nothing that can be done to stop it. That is simply not true.

When I was 16, we get kicked out of our house because my mother and my father were separated, so we didn't have money to pay. We got kicked out and had to live with my grandmother, sleeping in the living room, for many years.

I buy sleeping bags, food, gloves and warmers, and I just usually go out in Bath, which is where I'm from, and hand them out. I've done it on Christmas Eve, schedule allowing.

It should be obvious that banning begging or criminalising rough sleeping will do little to combat homelessness.