Shelter Quotes

“Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

“One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.”
― Lorrie Moore, Like Life: Stories

“When a storm of harassment disturbs our thinking and brings us down to our knees, the umbrella of our imagination can shield us against destructive aggression. It is offering shelter and is teaching us how to conquer ourselves, train our resilience, and grit our teeth. We better learn to adopt the virtue of endurance, as life consists of both ‘passion’ and ‘patience.’ ("The umbrella")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Don't let the rain drive you to the wrong shelter; the shade can turn out to be your protector and also your destroyer, and sometimes the rain is the perfect protector from the rain.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“She was my shelter and my storm.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me

“Shade for a man
And shelter for animals,
Planted in your name,
May you be the same for those around you,
Every year the same.”
― Nancy J. Cavanaugh, This Journal Belongs to Ratchet

“Getting into a fight with a popular senior. Pissing off a school teacher and the local chief of police. Hanging with two major-league losers." She slapped my back. "Welcome to high school.”
― Harlan Coben, Shelter

“Sweet girl, maybe close the world off and look at him for an hour
or two.
This is your fairy.
It ain’t perfect and it ain’t honey sweet with roses on the bed.
It’s real and raw and ugly at times. But this is your love.
Don’t throw it away searching for someone else’s love. Don’t be greedy. Instead, shelter it. Protect it. Capture every second of easy, pull through every storm of hardship. And when you can, look at him, lying next to you, trusting you not to harm him. Trusting you not to go.
Be someone’s someone for someone.
Be that someone for him.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“As day is to a sword, night is to a shield.”
― Anthony Liccione

“Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

“And what's more, he'll go and live with his friend unless his friend is allowed to come in and live with him...His friend must have a silk cushion just like his and sleep in your room too. Otherwise he will go and sleep in the coal-cellar with his friend”
― P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins

“Families are wonderful institution," he said. "I value mine more than I can possibly say. But each of us has an individual life to live, our own path to tread, our own destiny to forge. You can imagine, if you will, how my family wished to shelter and protect me and do my living for me so that I would never again know fear or pain or abandonment. Eventually I had to step clear of them-or I might have fallen into the temptation of allowing them to do just that.”
― Mary Balogh, Simply Love

“I felt it shelter to speak to you. -Emily Dickinson”
― Louisa Thomsen Brits, The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Living Well

“They had slept in the shelter of the ruins, though neither of them really got true rest.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Empire of Storms

“Please don´t drown into his fears, his concrete fists don´t let him again, break the bridge of your nose with his cruel born hits. Then disappear into that mask of misery.”
― Anthony Liccione

“Even if the roof of a house leaks a lot, it still provides more shelter than a tree.”
― Sanu Sharma, विप्लवी [Biplavi]

“Like most species, we have come to expect that we shall wake up more or less where we fell asleep. We associate the night with being static, becalmed. We might toss and turn a bit, and some may even sleepwalk. But as a rule it is the one period in each 24-hour shift when our frenzied movements hither and yon come to a halt. Hence there is something indefinably sneaky about popping up somewhere in the morning at a location that bears little relation to the one we were inhabiting the night before. It is perhaps the nearest most of us come to performing a magic trick.”
― Dixe Wills, At Night: A Journey Round Britain from Dusk Till Dawn

“Never underestimate the value of a tree or your mother; you never know when you might need their shade and shelter.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya, Our Nepal, Our Pride

“Sometimes language is all we have, and poetry has proven time and again to be a great equalizer, transformer, and community-builder. Especially during the pandemic, many people found shelter in poetry as a way to process personal and collective traumas. Poetry that offers sustenance or healing, or that inspires during a time of major upheaval, often has the power to bring people together, to initiate change, or to call forth action.”
― Aileen Cassinetto

“The basic needs of every human being include food, water, shelter, love, security, and a sense of belonging. If you can meet these needs without complaining, you will live peacefully, successfully, and joyfully.”
― Gift Gugu Mona, The Kind of Substance You Need For Your Success

“During the brief war with Iran, I found myself several times trapped in the neighborhood bomb shelter with people I barely knew. It was stressful. The missiles were frightening, but there was something straightforward and clear about them. People, on the other hand, are a lot more ambiguous and confusing, especially when they’re crammed into a small, closed space, listening to sirens and explosions on the other side of a concrete wall. But the explosive reality outside the shelter was soon forgotten, replaced by an unpleasant group dynamic that reminded me of a bad high school field trip: Who ends up sitting in the unsafe spot right opposite the door? When are we allowed to open it and leave? How do I get away from the sweaty neighbor who keeps checking his WhatsApp updates? And how the hell do you explain to the sad French Bulldog who’s in love with your left leg that you’re a happily married man? And yet all these worries, exasperating though they are, pale in comparison with the one really important question: When the missile attack finally ends and we open that steel door, what kind of world will be waiting for us out there?”
― Etgar Keret

“If I could build a grand palace with a thousand, ten-thousand rooms
A safe-house standing on a hill so strong that violent storms can’t destroy
If I could shelter all the impoverished poets and scholars under heaven
Offer them a gathering place of peace and joy—
If I could hold this spectacular vision in my eyes
Then I would gladly freeze to death in my lonely broken home”
― Tu Fu

“The dogwood tree in what used to be their backyard was a blackened stump. Every spring, Rachelle had mailed its cream-colored buds to her family back in Fresno. She remembered how the tree had sheltered her on that night the previous spring when she had clutched the pregnancy test and learned that a baby was coming. Her son was finally here, but he had some into a world that Rachelle didn't recognize.”
― Lizzie Johnson, Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire

“If existence is mandatory, access to the space required to live it shouldn’t be optional.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human

“Human dignity does not require castles. The standard is far more basic: a room with a door that closes. A place where the public world ends and the private self can be formed. We cannot remain perpetually observed without losing something essential. Identity matters. It structures our psychology. People need a place to think without interruption, to laugh without explanation, and to weep without humiliation. It’s in their own rooms that they choose who enters, what happens to them, and how they develop away from public expectation. Without privacy, it becomes harder to understand ourselves.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human

“Free shelter isn’t impossible. It’s just a choice we haven’t made yet.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human

“Shelter is strangely absent from the broader conversation about universal human rights. Society moved it from a moral category into an economic incentive. While society has accepted it is wrong to leave anyone to die of thirst, it has not extended that same instinct to permanent housing. To governments, investors, and landlords, shelter feels like something you must merit because they see profit. Their thinking is, however, flawed because food and water both exist to satisfy the same human biology. They’re changing the moral rule based on the size of the object instead of the nature of the need. A need does not become less essential simply because it is harder to guarantee.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human

“The argument for free shelter has a singular objective: put a person indoors. There is very little ambiguity. A home exists where one did not exist before. Undoing the price of being human carries a transformative reward because it means a portion of humanity’s freedom can be returned. This has been our oldest struggle. This was always the assignment: not survival, but the freedom from it.”
― Kristian Ventura, The Price of Being Human

“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

“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