Vagrant Quotes

Internalize the vagrant mind and fix it in the Lord. Then the meditation will be profound and intense. Don't open the eyes. Don't move from the seat. Melt yourself down into Him. Dive in the deep corners of your heart. Get immerse in the brilliant Atman. Drink the nectar of Immortality. Now enjoy the silence. Son of the nectar! Rejoice! Peace! Silence! Glory! ~ Sivananda

As to when I shall visit civilization, it will not be soon, I think. I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities. Do you blame me then for staying here, where I feel that I belong and am one with the world around me? It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty ...
Even from your scant description, I know that I could not bear the routine and humdrum of the life that you are forced to lead. I don't think I could ever settle down. I have known too much of the depths of life already, and I would prefer anything to an anticlimax. ~ Everett Ruess

She soon learned that to survive atrocity is to be made an honorary consul to a republic of pain. There existed unspoken protocols governing how she was expected to suffer. Total breakdown, a failure to grieve graciously, was a violation of those rules. But so was the absence of suffering, so was outright forgiveness.What she and others like her were allowed was a kind of passive bereavement, the right to pose for newspaper photographs holding framed pictures of their dead relations in their hands, the right to march in boisterous but toothless parades, the right to call for an end to bloodshed as though bloodshed were some pest or vagrant who could be evicted or run out of town. As long as she adhered to those rules, moved within those margins, she remained worthy of grand, public sympathy. ~ Omar El Akkad

The most adorable thing about Toronto is that she remains fiercely aloof and indifferent to the fads and entrepreneurial fevers of her lovers. She is intractably herself, admissive to the most vagrant, sober in a way that gets misinterpreted as stodginess. Her generosity extends to the meek as well as the gold diggers. Mercifully, she doesn't give a hoot about our portraits of her, but just waits, patiently, for our affection and citizenship. ~ Pier Giorgio Di Cicco

Personal effects: how irrelevant they are, how sad, how lost, how vagrant, without the force that gives them purpose. ~ Sarah Hall

I had to de-program myself. From myself. Had to reinvent rituals of purification. So full of the vagrant pollutions of others. It was time to detox. Not only from alcohol, sex, and drugs, but from needy leeches who looked to swab me with their sores. Detox from my own needy lechery. Had to locate the center wound and cauterize. Undo the original sin, the origin of my sickness ... Had to learn to replace Them, It, Want, Hurt, Anger, Sorrow, Loss, with Power, Healing, Wisdom, Fulfillment, Satisfaction. ~ Lydia Lunch

We are all victims, Anselmo.
Our destinies are decided
by a cosmic roll of the dice,
the winds of the stars,"
the vagrant breezes
of fortune that blow from
the windmills of the gods. ~ H.L. Dietrich

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

A honest man is seldom a vagrant. ~ Cato The Younger

Here I love you.
In the dark pines the wind disentangles itself.
The moon glows like phosphorous on the vagrant waters.
Days, all one kind, go chasing each other.

The snow unfurls in dancing figures.
A silver gull slips down from the west.
Sometimes a sail. High, high stars.
Oh the black cross of a ship.
Alone.


Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet.
Far away the sea sounds and resounds.
This is a port.

Here I love you.
Here I love you and the horizon hides you in vain.
I love you still among these cold things.
Sometimes my kisses go on those heavy vessels
that cross the sea towards no arrival.
I see myself forgotten like those old anchors.

The piers sadden when the afternoon moors there.
My life grows tired, hungry to no purpose.
I love what I do not have. You are so far.
My loathing wrestles with the slow twilights.
But night comes and starts to sing to me.

The moon turns its clockwork dream.
The biggest stars look at me with your eyes.
And as I love you, the pines in the wind
want to sing your name with their leaves of wire.
Pablo Neruda ~ Pablo Neruda

Stories, in order to become stories, must be simplified, stripped of extraneous detail and vagrant feeling ~ Robert Fulford

I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the street car and the star sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading into the unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities. ~ Everett Ruess

Hundreds and hundreds of beautiful horses in the parade and a man without a silver saddle is a vagrant. ~ Will Rogers

Please do me a favor if you can. Next time you see a vagrant wandering or slumming, ask him or her: "HOW COME YOU HATE CATS?!" and then walk away in disgust. That'd be great. ~ Noah Nichols

Like most things in life, there's also a spiritual side to my beard. Look at John the Baptist, one of the most important people in the New Testament. According to Matthew 3:4, "John's clothes were made of camel's hair, and he had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey." He baptized Jesus, who was God in human body, despite his appearance being that of a deranged vagrant. When I try to visualize John the Baptist, I see a bearded hunter who had to have some sort of weaponry to function in the wild. I would also assume he dipped the locusts in wild honey before he ate them. Based on what I read in the Bible about John the Baptist, I actually tried to eat a locust once, but it tasted terrible, which gave me the idea that John the Baptist probably dipped them in honey first. Then again, almost everything tastes good with honey. ~ Jase Robertson

Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances. ~ C.D. Wright

From the corners of her mouth, thick yellow goo bubbles. It matches the mess between Vesper's fingers, the slime on her chin, on her legs, the blobs that randomly pepper things, the blast radius massive, confounding ~ Peter Newman

I'm not a vagrant. I'm a hobo. Big difference. ~ Lee Child

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. ~ Ales Steger

It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream
a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought
a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities! ~ Mark Twain

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

With his hair tied back and about three days worth of beard Win looked more like a vagrant than a comm guru. Except for those keen, blue eyes. Eyes currently alive with that uncomfortable piercing quality, as if he were reading his mind. ~ Marcha A. Fox

Suddenly a ragged man wearing a hairnet and flip-flops walks toward us, holding a stack of pamphlets. Sophie, scared, hides behind her mother's chair. "My brother," the vagrant asks me, "have you found the Lord Jesus Christ?"
"I didn't know he was looking for me."
"Is He your personal savior?"
"You know," I say, "I'm still kind of hoping to rescue myself."
"The man shakes his head, dreadlocks like snakes. "None of us are strong enough for that," he replies, and moves on. ~ Jodi Picoult

As Geography without History seemeth a carkasse without motion; so History without Geography wandreth as a Vagrant without a certaine habitation. ~ John Smith

It's a cruel fact of war that it takes little more than applying pressure to one finger to end another person's life. More than that, it's a cruel fact of life that we are hardwired to follow the crowd in a moment of panic. ~ Trevor D. Richardson

Night winds in Georgia are vagrant poets, whispering. ~ Jean Toomer

As a people we practiced excess. Excess in everything - pleasure, gaud display, endless toil, and death. Vagrant children slept in the alleys. Ragpicking was a profession. A conspicuously self-satisfied class of new wealth and weak intellect was all aglitter in a setting of mass misery. ~ E.L. Doctrow

The vagrant, the squatter, had been redrawn, yet qualitatively he/she remained the same: a piece of white trash on the margins of rural society. Observers recognized how the moving mass of undesirables in the constantly expanding West challenged democracy's central principle. California was a wake-up call. Anxious southerners focused attention not only on their slave society and slave economy, but on the ever-growing numbers of poor whites who made the permanently unequal top-down social order perfectly obvious. Who really spoke of equality among whites anymore? No one of any note. Let us put it plainly: on the path to disunion, the roadside was strewn with white trash. ~ Nancy Isenberg

Other than involving yourself with ungrateful vegetable matter, colour, vigour and fascination can be imparted into a small outdoor space by several other methods.

In the 18th century, the inclusion of a hermit on one's estate was regarded as the epitome of country house style. There is absolutely no reason why today's dandy should not avail himself of the same privilege. It's a straightforward enough matter to entice a hopelessly drunk vagrant back to your premises using the simple lure of an opened bottle of wine. Once there, dress him in a bed sheet, wreathe his head in foliage and invite him to take up residence in an old barrel with the promise of unlimited alcohol, tobacco and scraps from your table in return for a sterling display of relentless solitude. Such a move not only provides the disadvantaged with ideal employment opportunities, but also enhances your reputation for stylish romanticism. Watch your friends gape in wonderment at the picturesque spectacle as your hermit sporadically peers out the top of the barrel and matters a few enigmatic words of wisdom. ~ Vic Darkwood Gustav Temple

Williams, having awarded Orwell the title of exile, immediately replaces it with the description 'vagrant'. A vagrant will, for example, not be reassured or comforted by Williams's not-very-consoling insistence that '"totalitarian" describes a certain kind of repressive social control, but, also, any real society, any adequate community, is necessarily a totality. To belong to a community is to be a part of a whole, and, necessarily, to accept, while helping to define, its disciplines.' In other words, Williams is inviting Orwell and all of us to step back inside the whale! Remember your roots, observe the customs of the tribe, recognise your responsibilities. The life of the vagrant or exile is unwholesome, even dangerous or deluded. The warmth of the family and the people is there for you; so is the life of the 'movement.' If you must criticize, do so from within and make sure that your criticisms are constructive.

This rather peculiar attempt to bring Orwell back into the fold is reinforced by this extraordinary sentence: 'The principle he chose was socialism, and Homage to Catalonia is still a moving book (quite apart from the political controversy it involves) because it is a record of the most deliberate attempt he ever made to become part of a believing community.' I leave it to any reader of those pages to find evidence for such a proposition; it is true that Orwell was very moved by the Catalan struggle and by the friends he made in the course of it. But h ~ Christopher Hitchens

I try to believe everything I read in the newspapers, but I had difficulty with last week's account of the London vagrant who was found, after death, to be carrying £1,500 in small change in his socks.
My reason for doubting the story is that I, too, like to carry small change in my socks, but I have found that with more that £15 or £20 worth it becomes impossible to walk. ~ Auberon Waugh

Tears came to my eyes when I read of a mere boy in one of our eastern cities who noticed a vagrant asleep on a sidewalk and who then went to his own room, retrieved his own pillow, and placed it beneath the head of that one whom he knew not. Perhaps there came from the precious past the welcome words: 'Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me' (Matt. 25:40). ~ Thomas S. Monson

As a practical matter, I like the dramatic monologue for its compelling intimacy. To be inside one's character, to register his or her every vagrant thought, emotion, and response - the first-person viewpoint grants this privilege and immediacy. ~ Norman Lock

Zachariah, Zachariah,' whispers Rachel, casting a practised eye over the back of his head and down the length of him, from the shoulder blades where his wings once grew, epochs ago, in some other guise: angel - guardian, avenging - or great vagrant bird - Daurian Jackdaw, Chimney Swift, Pacific Loon! ~ Emma Richler

I believe we were created for ecstasy. And redeemed for it, at considerable cost. Certain vagrant moments are, moreover, clues to the narrative structure and texture of things. ~ Daniel Berigan

This was a vagrant of sixty-five, who was going to prison for not playing the flute; or, in other words, for begging in the streets, and doing noting for his livelihood. In the next cell, was another man, who was going to the same prison for hawking tin saucepans without a licence; thereby doing something for his living, in defiance of the Stamp-office. ~ Charles Dickens

He had been struck, in the course of his travels in the old countries of Europe, with the wisdom of those notices posted up in country towns, that "any vagrant found begging there would be put in the stocks," and he had observed that no beggars were to be seen in these neighborhoods; having doubtless thrown off their rags and their poverty, and become rich under the terror of the law. He ~ Washington Irving

The Soviet Constitution provides a key to the understanding of Soviet psychiatry. In the West, our tradition of human rights pits the citizen against the State. Very occasionally, a politician will, like John Kennedy, ask us to think what we can do for our country. But, in general, we have rights without any major duties other than the duty to obey the law. If I wish to live as a tramp or to devote my life to a study of butterflies, it's my business and my right to do so as long as I hurt no one else. The Soviet constitution proclaims a rather different relationship. The citizen is meant to be a productive member of the socialist community. If I choose to be a tramp or butterfly-maniac, I am hurting others because I am depriving the State of my labour. This is not necessarily bad, just odd given Western traditions. But being a 'parasite' is an actual crime much like being a vagrant was in Tudor England. ~ David Cohen

On his thirteenth birthday he had seen a film in which the central character was a painter who, unable to sell his work, grew cold and hungry as he went from one unsuccessful interview to the next; eventually he had become a vagrant, sleeping in the streets of the city where once he had walked in hope. Hawksmoor left the cinema in a mood of profound, terrified apprehension and, from that time, he was filled with a sense of time passing and with the fear that he might be left discarded on its banks. The fear had not left him, although now he could no longer remember from where it came: he looked back on his earlier life without curiosity, since it seemed to lack intrinsic interest, and when he looked forward he saw the same steady attainment of goals without any joy in their attainment. For him, the state of happiness was simply the state of not suffering and, if he cared for anything, it was for oblivion. ~ Peter Ackroyd

Maybe that was the price of ignorance, I thought, looking at the naked vagrant. Maybe Japan had to pay for the ignorant things it did in Nanking. Because ignorance as I'd got tired of hearing, is no excuse for evil. ~ Mo Hayder

The mind is a vagrant thing ... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time. ~ Daniel J. Boorstin

In its wild state, the truth is fluid, slippery, vagrant, scrambled, promiscuous, kaleidoscopic, and beautiful. ~ Rob Brezsny

But these notes make no pretense of being a record of fact. That isn't their object. They are merely notes of impressions, a record of vagrant thoughts, hopes, ideas that have floated through the mind of one present-day American. It is likely that I have not, and will not, put into them one truth, measuring by the ordinary standards of truth. It is my aim to be true to the essence of things. That's what I'm after. ~ Sherwood Anderson

Self-inflicted pain has a calming effect; it clears the head, diminishes one's fascination with the ego, and most important, gives one the sense of having taken some real action against the everyday foolishness of the body and of the vagrant, willful, heedless imagination. ~ Valerie Martin

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering; which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the middle ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la sainte terre" - to the holy land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a sainte-terrer", a saunterer - a holy-lander. They who never go to the holy land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all, but the Saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which indeed is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit (1) in us, to go forth and reconquer this holy land from the hands of the Infidels. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I like the lad who, when his father thought To clip his morning nap by hackneyed phrase Of vagrant worm by early songster caught, Cried, Served him right! it's not at all surprising; The worm was punished, sir, for early rising! ~ John Godfrey Saxe

The Unexpected stalks a farm in big boots like a vagrant bent on havoc. Not every farmer is an inventor, but the good ones have the seeds of invention within them. Economy and efficiency move their relentless tinkering and yet the real motive often seems to be aesthetic. The mind that first designed a cutter bar is not far different from a mind that can take the intractable steel of an outsized sickle blade and make it hum in the end. The question is how to reduce the simplicity that constitutes a problem ("It's simple; it's broke.") to the greater simplicity that constitutes a solution. ~ Verlyn Klinkenborg

Arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust, and in a sense it is. But failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community. ~ James Q. Wilson

A lawyer aint a priest. Nor a doctor. Law's more vagrant than sickness or sin. We make our case. We'd be fools to say what a dozen other fools might think of it. ~ Cormac McCarthy

A vagrant is everywhere at home. ~ Martial