#homelessness

As Secretary of Housing, I do have to express alarm, signal the alarm if you will, that the potential for homelessness to grow is there. ↗

— Henry Cisneros

#express #grow #homelessness #housing #i

Homelessness is a part of our American system. There should be nothing wrong with this condition as long as the individual is not sentenced to unnecessary suffering and punishment. ↗

— Jerzy Kosinski

#condition #homelessness #individual #long #nothing

The cause of homelessness is lack of housing. ↗

— Jonathan Kozol

#homelessness #housing #lack

That was our first home. Before I felt like an island in an ocean, before Calcutta, before everything that followed. You know it wasn’t a home at first but just a shell. Nothing ostentatious but just a rented two-room affair, an unneeded corridor that ran alongside them, second hand cane furniture, cheap crockery, two leaking faucets, a dysfunctional doorbell, and a flight of stairs that led to, but ended just before the roof (one of the many idiosyncrasies of the house), secured by a sixteen garrison lock, and a balcony into which a mango tree’s branch had strayed. The house was in a building at least a hundred years old and looked out on a street and a tenement block across it. The colony, if you were to call it a colony, had no name. The house itself was seedy, decrepit, as though a safe-keeper of secrets and scandals. It had many entries and exits and it was possible to get lost in it. And in a particularly inspired stroke of whimsy architectural genius, it was almost invisible from the main road like H.G. Wells’ ‘Magic Shop’. As a result, we had great difficulty when we had to explain our address to people back home. It went somewhat like this, ‘... take the second one from the main road….and then right after turning left from Dhakeshwari, you will see a bird shop (unspecific like that, for it had no name either)… walk straight in and take the stairs at the end to go to the first floor, that’s where we dwell… but don’t press the bell, knock… and don't walk too close to the cages unless you want bird-hickeys…’’ ('Left from Dhakeshwari') ↗

— Kunal Sen

#homelessness #reminiscence #architecture

Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#attachment #belonging #home #homelessness #roots

The public thinks that homelessness is about not having any accommodation to go to. ↗

— Iain Duncan Smith

#accommodation #any #go #having #homelessness

It's better to have nothing,' the children were saying. ↗

— Marilynne Robinson

#homelessness #poetic-fiction #beauty

First dates are like homeless vagrants: despite all efforts to avoid them, they’re always at McDonalds and you end up without any spare change. ↗