Quotes About Homelessness

How does a hardworking sixty-four-year-old-woman end up without a house or a permanent place to stay, relying on unpredictable low-wage work to survive? Living in a mile-high alpine wilderness, with intermittent snow and maybe mountain lions in a tiny trailer, scrubbing toilets at the mercy of employers who, on a whim, could cut her hours or even fire her? What does the future look like for someone like that?

Sameer and LaVonne were not naive. They know that, in the eyes of the law, they are homeless. But who can live under the weight of that word? The term "homeless" has metastasized beyond its literal definition, becoming a terrible threat. It whispers: Exiles. The Fallen. The Other. Those Who Have Nothing Left. "Our society's untouchables," LaVonne suggested on her blog.

Bleary-eyed, they find places to pull off the road and rest. In Walmart parking lots. On quiet suburban streets. At truck stops, amid the lullaby of idling engines. Then in the early morning hours—before anyone notices—they're back on the highway. Driving on, they're secure in this knowledge: The last free place in America is a parking spot.

During one long reporting trip, I had to get a prescription refilled. My doctor called a drugstore. Later he told me that, when the pharmacist demanded my home address, he didn't know how to answer and blurted out, "She's living in a van!" The pharmacist let it slide, but the episode made me think. In America, if you don't have an address, you're not a real person.

Why should the wealth of the country be stored in banks and elevators while the idle workman wanders homeless about the streets and the idle loafers who hoard the gold only to spend it in riotous living are rolling about in fine carriages from which they look out on peaceful meetings and call them riots?

Healthcare as a human right, it means that every child, no matter where you are born, should have access to a college or trade-school education if they so choose it, and I think no person should be homeless if we can have public structures and public policy to allow for people to have homes and food and lead a dignified life in the United States.

This country has so much wealth and so much poverty, and that seemed wrong to me. 'Evicted' was my Ph.D. dissertation.

I felt great empathy for the thousands of Americans who lost their home because of a system that failed them.

I was 17 and living on the streets. I had the education of technically an eighth-grader, but in reality, I had never had a formal education.

It's hard being homeless at any age, but at 16 years old? I can't even imagine. When you're a homeless teen, how do you build a future or have any sort of life?

When I was a child and they burned me out of my home, I was frightened and I ran away. Eventually I ran far away. It was to a place called France. Many of you have been there, and many have not. But I must tell you, ladies and gentlemen, in that country I never feared. It was like a fairyland place.

You don't want to end up telling somebody who's homeless or a refugee that stress is all perceptual, because it sure isn't in those cases. But most of us have fairly neurotic middle-class stressors.

If you ever go to Temple Square in Salt Lake City, if you stay there long enough, you'll see a homeless person standing in the middle of their nice, beautiful square, holding out a cup for change. And the Mormons don't ever ask him to leave.

I don't have a permanent place where I live. I'm in Atlanta about six or seven months out of the year. I gave up on my place in New York. I don't have a place in L.A., but sometimes when I go there for the hiatus, I stay in temporary housing. It's all over the place, and I don't know where I live!

How is it I'm begging you for housing, when you burnt my building down? You all ain't even playing fake-nice, like those other murderers. You are all cut-eye and snarls, all straight jargon, and nothing but the jargon.

I hunted rats and ate out of dustbins and saw my kittens killed and was hung by my tail and abused by wicked urchins," Graymalk said suddenly, "before the mistress found me. She was an orphan who'd lived on the streets. Her life had been even worse.

People sleeping on pavements gives industry a bad name. My friend was saying last week—he's the director of a multinational, mind you, not some small, two-paisa business—he was saying that at least two hundred million people are surplus to requirements, they should be eliminated.

Sherlock Homeless.

Why don't you live anywhere?" "Do you have a house?" "Of course." "Is it a pure unalloyed pleasure?" "Not entirely." "So there's your answer.

The attempt to make man absolutely at home in this world ended in man's becoming absolutely homeless.

From time to time they move you around from one cell to another, and that's always a big deal in your life. Your cell is just about all you've got, your only refuge. Like an animal's cage, it's your home — a home that would make anyone envy the homeless.

It is not altogether an easy matter to undress and get ready for the night when you have no chair, no bed, no table, no water, only a little straw, and are thrown in with numbers of other people in a dark room.

Do you really think it's all gone away? Mental illness has just moved underground, into the homeless shelters and the city parks. Out of sight, out of mind for the taxpayers. It's a crying shame.

If you see a lonely homeless, ask this question: Where the hell the society is? And here is the answer: It is rotten and enjoying somewhere!