Vagrant Quotes

“But the vagrant owns the whole vast earth that ends only at the nonexistent horizon, and his empire is an intangible one, for his domination and enjoyment of it are things of the spirit.”
― Isabelle Eberhardt, The Oblivion Seekers

“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.”
― Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor

“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.”
― Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor

“Some people ate less food less often when they each had a home than they now do as hobos.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“It's as though all the strings between the almighty and this man were ripped away, and he was left, a discarded marionette lying in the middle of the street. He gazes up at me and his smirk freezes the marrow in my bones. His bones, not mine, belong at Kudamm. It wasn't only Nazis who prohibited the crippled from begging. There have been others repulsed by the gaze of less-than-romantic possibilities of what we are.”
― Aleš Šteger, Berlin

“The Reluctant Guest by Stewart Stafford

My hand extended
to an off-the-grid stray;
Yet, still he scowls,
And smacks it away.

Near-gone from the world,
His blindfold horizon quails,
That veteran heart stiffens,
As frozen asphalt exhales.

A ghost at his own funeral,
Thwarting hopes of a life—
Institutionalised in cement,
A fold in warm cardboard strife.

Frontal assault to backdoor pivot:
Dinner in his mother’s memory.
A toothless grin at my tactic,
A bridge to nourishing festivity.

© 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford