homeless

You'd be surprised how difficult it is to ask alms of a stranger when you've never done it before, what a psychological barrier separates the honest man from the panhandler. ("Dusk To Dawn")

For the mentally disturbed, Marie knew these sandwich visits might be the only dependable moments in their lives. She also knew she delivered the sandwiches for her own sanity. Something would crumble inside of her if she ever walked by a homeless person and pretended not to notice. Or simply didn't care. In a way, she believed that homeless people were treated as Indians had always been treated. Badly. The homeless were like an Indian tribe, nomadic and powerless, just filled with more than any tribe's share of crazy people and cripples. So, a homeless Indian belonged to two tribes, and was the lowest form of life in the city. The powerful white men of Seattle had created a law that made it illegal to sit on the sidewalk. That ordinance was crazier and much more evil than any homeless person. Sometimes Marie wondered if she worked so hard at anything only because she hated powerful white men. She wondered if she went to college and received good grades just because she was looking for revenge.

Begging is much more difficult than it looks. Contrary to popular belief, it__ a high art form that takes years of dedicated practice to master.

Then, left alone, shivering, I happened to glance up. I stood, I froze, blinking up through the drift, the drift, the silent drift of blinding snow. I saw the high hotel windows, the lights, the shadows.What's it like up there? I thought. Are fires lit? Is it warm as breath? Who are all those people? Are they drinking? Are they happy?Do they even know I'm HERE?

When an officer finds themselves arresting pastors that are feeding people who have nothing, they should know they__e on the wrong side.

Happiness lives in every corner of your home and if you are homeless, it lives under the leaves of trees, hiding beneath the sky's cloudiness. All you need to do is to find it with patience.

We are homeless enough in this world under the best of circumstances without going to any special effort to test our capacity to be more so.

Before you call yourself a Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu or any other theology, learn to be human first.

In order to master compassion, you have to spend time getting to know monsters. When you can do that you will see that there are no monsters, only people that acted like monsters because no one gave them the time or compassion to hear their story.

It was as though God's hand was reaching down to Anna, and she was reaching her hands to Harvey and Joe, creating a circle of love.

He tried not to cry as he wondered if he would ever have a home again.

Sometimes what a person expresses in their eyes is more than all the books you could read on suffering.

Tell a child, that he will soon be homeless; he will slowly detach from the world. Tell that same child that he is now homeless, he will abandon all foundations. Tell the child he has a home again, he may return to Earth from his travels, but he will never want to see this world again.

Hide yourself in God, so when a man wants to find you he will have to go there first.

Sniffing glue is a homeless nonbeliever's prayer.

Whenever Ingrid and I got out of the suburbs, into Berkeley or San Francisco, and saw how other people lived, Ingrid would cry at the smallest of things- a little boy walking home by himself, a discarded cardboard sign saying HUNGRY PLEASE HELP. She would snap a picture, and by the time she lowered her camera, tears would already be falling. I always felt kind of guilty that I didn't feel as sad as she did, but now, watching Dylan, I think that's probably a good thing. I mean, you see a million terrible things every day, on the news and in the paper, and in real life. I'm not saying that it's stupid to feel sad, just that it would be impossible to let everything get to you and still get some sleep at night.

Even a life raft is only supposed to get you from the sinking ship back to land, you were never intended to live in the life raft, to drift years on end, in sight of land but never close enough.

I no longer follow the voices of the sane. I follow the ill because they see farther, feel much more and change what the sane will not. This is the paradox of philosophers---trying to understand mass delusion among great people that have faith and knowledge, yet they can__ graduate from their institutions of religious theology to apply the knowledge they have gained for the shifting of Zion---- from words to action; from comfort to uncomfortable; from self serving to self giving; from competition to supporting; to tradition to unity; from bias to acceptance; from me to us.