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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“One safe room with a bathroom, an area to cook, and a lockable door is all a person needs in order to live safely.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human

“Civilization is about reducing the parts of survival that are no longer necessary. What kind of protection leaves people without a place to sleep?”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human

“Lacking shelter is not evidence of personal failure. The system we’ve inherited is not designed to house everyone. That’s a structural problem. It’s a policy choice. A person can be born into poverty without their say, which is like entering a race already behind. Do we blame them for losing? You do not have to qualify for the right to live. Even if a person fails by every conventional measure, it is not justification for removing a roof over their head.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human

“Those least equipped to handle life, such as those with mental illness or addiction, are in many cases damaged by the system that refuses to guarantee their human rights. Yet society withholds the very thing that would produce better behavior. A lack of shelter leads to a chronic rewiring of the brain and nervous system, employment struggle, and impaired decision-making.

It is wrong for society to create instability in people and then blame them for being unstable. It uses selective logic because we already extend compassion to human vulnerability in other areas. We don’t say a sick person deserves illness because they failed. A child doesn’t deserve hunger because their parents made poor choices. When it comes to shelter, why does that logic stop? What we call “their fault” has other names: a medical bill, a violent partner, bad timing, a layoff, a death, or one missed payment. The distance between the housed and unhoused is far smaller than we want to admit. A home doesn’t solve every problem, but every problem becomes harder without one.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human

“Many critics of free shelter claim that every creature has always had to compete, gather resources, and secure its own food and shelter. But illness is natural, and we do not deny antibiotics. Drowning is natural, but we do not refuse rescue. The rule of the jungle does not apply to civilization.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human

“Shelter is not a privilege. It must be protected because it is the barrier between a human being and danger. Without it, no other freedom can be exercised. You cannot safely work, rest, protect yourself, or build a life without a home.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human

“The starting line we all share is tilted against us from the moment we’re born. Charging for shelter guarantees inequality before anyone has even begun. Before a person has even formed their first thought, they are placed inside an economy that will charge them to remain alive. In other words, they enter life already owing. We did not choose those terms. We were born into them. Universal shelter removes the immediate debt of existence and replaces it with fair protection.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human

“Many in response to free shelter say “not in my backyard.” Concerns for one’s community are understandable, but society is often too quick to assume a person who enters a community automatically brings danger and disorder. A stable home gives a person a place to sleep and exist. All neighborhoods deserve safety and care. But it’s contradictory for rights to be a demand for ourselves and a privilege we deny others. A neighborhood is made of people. And every person deserves the chance to be part of a safe, cared-for neighborhood too. Therefore, you cannot say a neighborhood deserves safety while denying safety to the people who make it a neighborhood. If someone paid for your home in full tomorrow, would you instantly become the neighbor you fear? Of course not. You would be the same person, just without rent. Shelter doesn’t change a person’s character, only their cost.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human

“Basic shelter is not a matter of taste or what someone has earned. Human beings need to sleep safely, use a bathroom, prepare food, store belongings, and protect themselves from weather. That is the benchmark. One needs the privacy to rest, think, and exist without being forced to share their life with strangers. A home is also the precondition for stable connection. Without a place to return to, relationships become harder to build. It allows a person to be findable, to welcome others, and to keep the dignity of not being forced to live every moment in public. There is a minimum space required to live.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human

“Actum was founded in 2024 to create permanent, universal housing, on the belief that no human being should have to pay for shelter. The purpose of this book is to articulate an idea humanity has struggled to name clearly. Organizations change. Generations fade. The principle must not disappear with them. It must outlive resistance until every person has the right to freely exist.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human