{"quotes":[{"text":"Begging is much more difficult than it looks. Contrary to popular belief, it’s a high art form that takes years of dedicated practice to master.","author":"Sol Luckman","tags":["art","beggar","begging","homeless","homelessness","hunger","mastery","poverty"],"id":1849,"author_id":"Sol+Luckman"},{"text":"Narcissism is as profitable to a model as scruffiness is to a homeless person.","author":"Mokokoma Mokhonoana","tags":["advertising","appearance","clothing","fashion","homelessness","image","model","modeling","modelling","models","narcissism","narcissists","personal-brand","personal-branding","pity","poverty","presentation"],"id":15100,"author_id":"Mokokoma+Mokhonoana"},{"text":"But this house felt strange. Dave asked what was going on, and John explained that the name on the eviction order belonged to the mother of several of the children. She had died two months earlier, and the children had simply gone on living in the house, by themselves. As the movers swept through the rooms, Gray Eyes took charge, giving orders to the other children; the youngest was a boy of about eight or nine. Upstairs, the movers found ratty mattresses on the floor and empty liquor bottles displayed like trophies. In the damp basement, clothes were flung everywhere. The house and the yard were littered with trash. “Disgusting,” Tim said to the roaches scaling the kitchen wall. As the landlord changed the locks with a power drill and the movers pushed the contents of the house onto the wet curb, the children began to run around and laugh. When the move was done, the crew gathered by the trucks, instinctively stomping the ground to shake loose any stowaway roaches. Those who smoked reached for their packs. They didn’t know where the children would go, and they didn’t ask.","author":"Matthew Desmond","tags":["eviction","homelessness","poverty"],"id":34594,"author_id":"Matthew+Desmond"},{"text":"The Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing tells the story of the gangster leaders who carried out anti-communist purges in Indonesia in 1965 to usher in the regime of Suharto.The film’s hook, which makes it compelling and accessible, is that the filmmakers get Anwar —one of the death-squad leaders, who murdered around a thousand communists using a wire rope—and his acolytes to reenact the killings and events around them on film in a variety of genres of their choosing.In the film’s most memorable sequence, Anwar—who is old now and actually really likable, a bit like Nelson Mandela, all soft and wrinkly with nice, fuzzy gray hair—for the purposes of a scene plays the role of a victim in one of the murders that he in real life carried out.A little way into it, he gets a bit tearful and distressed and, when discussing it with the filmmaker on camera in the next scene, reveals that he found the scene upsetting. The offcamera director asks the poignant question, “What do you think your victims must’ve felt like?” and Anwar initially almost fails to see the connection. Eventually, when the bloody obvious correlation hits him, he thinks it unlikely that his victims were as upset as he was, because he was “really” upset. The director, pressing the film’s point home, says, “Yeah but it must’ve been worse for them, because we were just pretending; for them it was real.”Evidently at this point the reality of the cruelty he has inflicted hits Anwar, because when they return to the concrete garden where the executions had taken place years before, he, on camera, begins to violently gag.This makes incredible viewing, as this literally visceral ejection of his self and sickness at his previous actions is a vivid catharsis. He gagged at what he’d done.After watching the film, I thought—as did probably everyone who saw it—how can people carry out violent murders by the thousand without it ever occurring to them that it is causing suffering? Surely someone with piano wire round their neck, being asphyxiated, must give off some recognizable signs? Like going “ouch” or “stop” or having blood come out of their throats while twitching and spluttering into perpetual slumber?What it must be is that in order to carry out that kind of brutal murder, you have to disengage with the empathetic aspect of your nature and cultivate an idea of the victim as different, inferior, and subhuman. The only way to understand how such inhumane behavior could be unthinkingly conducted is to look for comparable examples from our own lives. Our attitude to homelessness is apposite here.It isn’t difficult to envisage a species like us, only slightly more evolved, being universally appalled by our acceptance of homelessness.“What? You had sufficient housing, it cost less money to house them, and you just ignored the problem?”They’d be as astonished by our indifference as we are by the disconnected cruelty of Anwar.","author":"Russell Brand","tags":["compassion","empathy","evil","homelessness","violence"],"id":35863,"author_id":"Russell+Brand"},{"text":"It was meant to be, two trolls living in a tree.","author":"KayeC Jones","tags":["children-s-books","fantasy","homelessness","inspirational","trolls","wandering"],"id":37652,"author_id":"KayeC+Jones"},{"text":"Transparent tubes divided Phil’s blood into shades of red, fading to straw colored plasma. I watched his fluid swirl past his shoulders and disappear into machines. He offered himself to blood banks all over the city, his plasma rushed to hospitals where it would circulate through other people’s bodies. The map of my love’s tapped arteries would look like a bloodshot eye over the city of Albuquerque. His blood bought us dinner. I dreamed he was my mother, and I nursed his arm. I wrote a poem about it, how I suckled his arm dry like a sore teat.","author":"Jalina Mhyana","tags":["blood","homelessness","hunger","love","marriage","memoir"],"id":41752,"author_id":"Jalina+Mhyana"},{"text":"Moments later, I was climbing nervously into the back of the car. The driver wore the archetypal expression of an antagonist. No words were exchanged beyond the brief lines uttered to this nameless stranger, whose inclinations remained unclear. The car sped along empty roads and traversed dingy alleyways. Music blared from its speakers. I did not remember exhaling throughout the entire journey.","author":"Agnes Chew","tags":["anchoring","attachment","beauty","belonging","booksactually","consciousness","country","desire","empowerment","expression","farewell","home","homelessness","inclinations","independence","individuality","inspirational","ireadbooksactually","love","melodies","memories","music","nameless","nationality","past-lives","present","prose","reality","roots","self-assurance","self-awareness","self-containment","self-determination","self-esteem","self-reliance","self-respect","self-sufficiency","self-trust","sglitftw","singapore-literature","singlit","space","stranger","travel","wanderlust","world"],"id":49841,"author_id":"Agnes+Chew"},{"text":"This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person's comforting, defining sense of having solid ground beneath their feet.","author":"Salman Rushdie","tags":["exile","homelessness","immigrants","rootedness","satan"],"id":58751,"author_id":"Salman+Rushdie"},{"text":"It's not a homeless life for me,It's just that I'm home lessThan others like to be.","author":"Akilnathan Logeswaran","tags":["home","homeless","homelessness","life","live","living","traveling","travels"],"id":60658,"author_id":"Akilnathan+Logeswaran"},{"text":"I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.","author":"Howard Zinn","tags":["crimes","criminal-justice-system","cycle-of-violence","desperation","greed","homelessness","imprisonment","incarceration","jail","justice","poverty","prison","punishment","racism","retribution","unemployment"],"id":66537,"author_id":"Howard+Zinn"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":68,"pages":7,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}