Tramp Quotes

“A man can sleep around, no questions asked, but if a woman makes nineteen or twenty mistakes she's a tramp.”
― Joan Rivers

“I was like, Am I gay? Am I straight? And I realized...I'm just slutty. Where's my parade?”
― Margaret Cho

“Perhaps the greatest charm of tramp-life is the absence of monotony. In Hobo Land the face of life is protean—an ever changing phantasmagoria, where the impossible happens and the unexpected jumps out of the bushes at every turn of the road. The hobo never knows what is going to happen the next moment; hence, he lives only in the present moment. He has learned the futility of telic endeavor, and knows the delight of drifting along with the whimsicalities of Chance”
― Jack London, The Road

“He cut short my request for something to eat, snapping out, "I don't believe you want to work."
Now this was irrelevant. I hadn't said anything about work. The topic of conversation I had introduced was "food." In fact, I didn't want to work. I wanted to take the westbound overland that night.”
― Jack London, The Road

“Dear, dear, it only shows that there is nothing diviner about a king than there is about a tramp, after all. He is just a cheap and hollow artificiality when you don't know he is a king. But reveal his quality, and dear me it takes your very breath away to look at him. I reckon we are all fools. Born so, no doubt.”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

“A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor -- it is a fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it.”
― George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

“On the hill there was a poor old tramp wandering about with his stick, in among the carriages. A mass of rags covered his shoulders, and a squashed beaver-hat, bent down into the shape of a bowl, concealed his face; but, when he took it off, he exposed, instead of eyelids, two yawning bloodstained holes. The flesh was tattered into scarlet strips; and fluid was trickling out, congealing into green crusts that reached down to his nose, with black nostrils that kept sniffing convulsively.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

“Some people ate less food less often when they each had a home than they now do as hobos.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Last night, Good Friday night, at the bottom of the escalator at King’s X tube, a weasel-faced man in uniform was sweeping up rubbish with a wide broom, drink cartons, cigarette packets with all the dust and filthy scraps of the day which he pushed towards an elegant long black glove that was lying there. I expected him to pick it up as I would have – I thought of picking it up, but was too late. He smothered it in a wide sweep. It seemed to me extraordinary and shocking that he had no feeling for it. Several images went through my mind, a symbolic hand, a dead blackbird, an ornamental bookmark fallen from a lectern Bible – any once-precious relic being tumbled in the dirt. As I went up the escalator I remembered the Tatterdemallion whom I haven’t seen for months and thought of his body, if he were to die in the tube, being tumbled about with the rest of the thrown-away rubbish.” David Thomson, In Camden Town”
― David Thomson, In Camden Town

“Sometimes I think we're all gentlemen of the road. It's just that most of us haven't got the courage to take that first step.”
― Ian Rankin

“The tramp enjoys the treasure without looking for gold.”
― Mantaranjot Mangat, Plotless

“My spirits are like that of a tramp-
I belong to nowhere!
I am sure I would be in love forever
With this life of adventure!”
― Neelam Saxena Chandra, the lost mint taste