Rebecca Solnit  - Quotes

 As Elizabeth Blackmar and Ray Rosenzweig wrote in their magisterial history of [Central Park in NYC]: 'The issue of demoncratic access to the park has also been raised by the increasing number of homeless New Yorkers. Poor people--from the 'squatters' of the 1850s to the 'tramps' of the 1870s and 1890s to the Hooverville residents of the 1930s--have always turned to the park land for shelter...The growing visibility of homeless people in Central Park osed in the starkest terms the contradiction between Americans' commitment to democratic space and their acquiescence in vast disparities of wealth and power. 

Tags: democracy   homeless   landscape   parks     


Chuck Klosterman  - Quotes

 You used to be able to tell the difference between hipsters and homeless people. Now, it's between hipsters and retards. I mean, either that guy in the corner in orange safety pants holding a protest sign and wearing a top hat is mentally disabled or he is the coolest fucking guy you will ever know. 

Tags: cool   hipster   homeless     
Robert Clark  - Quotes

 Above all others I pity the homeless: where can they go to masturbate? 

Tags: homelessness   humour   masturbation     


Marilynne Robinson  - Quotes

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

Tags: beauty   homelessness     
Donald O'Donovan  - Quotes

 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. 

Tags: homelessness     
Nick Flynn  - Quotes

 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. 

Tags: family   fathers   homelessness     


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