Bums Quotes

“Show me a hero and I'll show you a bum.”
― Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, Baa Baa Black Sheep

“It's impossible to fall of mountains you fool!”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“The honky-tonk bartender, who doubled as bouncer, waiter, and cashier, was in no mood to compromise. Mercy was not in him. He came out around the open end of the long counter, waddled threatening across the floor in a sullen, red-faced fury and began to shake the inanimate figure lying across the table with its head bedded on its arms. "Hey, you! Do your sleeping in the gutter!"

If you gave these bums an inch; they took a yard. And this one was a particularly glaring example of the genus bar-fly. He was in here all the time like this, inhaling smoke and then doing a sunset across the table. He'd been in here since four this afternoon. The boss and he, who were partners in the joint - the bartender called it jernt - would have been the last ones to claim they were running a Rainbow Room, but at least they were trying to give the place a little class, keep it above the level of a Bowery smoke-house; they even paid a guy to pound the piano and a canary to warble three times a week. And then bums like this had to show up and give the place a bad look!

He shook the recumbent figure again, more roughly than the first time. Shook him so violently that the whole reedy table under him rattled and threatened to collapse. "Come on, clear out, I said! Pay me for what you had and get outa here!" ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")”
― Cornell Woolrich, The Fantastic Stories of Cornell Woolrich

“Some men’s chests are more buttlike than some women’s butts.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“All my friends are bums. We all gather round our camp-fire (in a can) and sing songs of togetherness as we cuddle, to preserve our warmth...”
― Will Advise

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

“You wonder what had happened, when a feller like that, in a place like that, talked of a childhood that might have as easily belonged to a millionaire, a lawyer, a schoolteacher, you. You had to think he was defective somehow, or had fucked up not once, not twice, but again and again, a peculiar resolve to his life. That was the thing, that resolve. We didn’t credit it. You looked at him and your brain said he was on the losing end of one of the two bargains that America made with you. There was the romantic one, that of the rambler, the man out seeking his destiny, living by his wits, all that horseshit. Then there was the classical American dare, that you could risk all, take an internal grudge and make of it a billion dollars and get a monumental tomb in the bargain. But the truth was neither. America was a grindstone. She used those notions as twin abrasives to wear you down into a dutiful drudge walking the straight and narrow. But there was something in the hearts of the some men, some of whom became Fritz, that wouldn’t accept that. These men in crummy bars, some of them, most of them, they were main-chance fellers. You could take ten of these wrecks and offer them a salesman’s job, a dozen white shirts and ties, forty Gs a year and perks, a neat house on a quiet street, a yard, a car, a dog, a wife, an expense account, a Chinese laundryman, membership in a church, grandkids who’d bounce on their knees, and you’d be lucky if one or two took you up on it. And those two would be the most defeated, the most broken and worn down. Take the same ten and offer them eight dollars a day to be litter bearers on a great adventure, a hike after a lost civilization, a one in hundred shot at survival, a one in thousand shot at a fabulous fortune of jewels and gold, and if you provided rum along the way, nine of the ten would sign up. I guarantee it. I guarantee too that the one or two who took the salesman’s job—within a year or two or three, he’d be fucking up again and again, no matter how many chances you gave him. He’s a main-chance feller, and even if he didn’t have the brains or the luck to make it work, he still couldn’t abide the line others toed, even if he couldn’t think of anything else to do with his life but the miserable American two step—toe the line, fuck up, toe the line, fuck up....”
― T.D. Badyna, Flick

“Sheila miała własną walizkę i my ze Slimem też i poszliśmy na przystanek i kupiliśmy Sheili bilet i zaczekaliśmy z nią na autobus. Ale kiedy ten autobus szykował się już do odjazdu, wszyscy byliśmy strasznie smutni i wystraszeni. „Jadę w ciemną noc” powiedziała Sheila, jak zobaczyła autobus z napisem Chicago. „Jadę i nigdy już tu nie wrócę. Trochę jakbym umarła. Ale jadę tam, do Kalifornii”. „Raczej dopiero zaczynasz żyć, skoro tam jedziesz” zaśmiał się Slim, a Sheila powiedziała, ze ma taka nadzieje.”
― Jack Kerouac, Pic

“the words on the paper im readin are blarin out at me loud an angrylike tellin me there's no end to the recession theres no jobs theres no peace theres no hope man an people wonder why i do what i do? an bums are bummin lights from me and babies are squintin up at me an my coffee is rupturing my gut bitterlike an i guess the world is kinda like the coffee sometimes – ill be suffering thru both tomorrow.”
― Scott C. Holstad

“I am a worthy cause," said Jack. "No. You are a bum," said the man.”
― Janet Schulman, Jack the bum and the Halloween handout

“He wondered if he'd be better off staying at the bum shelter with his false bum and forgetting about his real bum. But he couldn't. His bum was trying to take over the world.”
― Griffiths, Andy

“Stenchgator, the Great Unwiped Bum... was listed in the Bumper Book of Bums as the stinkiest bum in the world. Most bums only registered one or two points on the Rectum scale, but Stenchgator came in at a nose-bruising 9.8 points.”
― Griffiths, Andy

“Astronomers have their heads stuck up their bums looking for the black hole.”
― Steven Magee

“He always figured most homeless people to be mindless savages. Naturally, he usually kept that opinion to himself.”
― Jason Medina, The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel

“In my school, if your skirt is just one centimetre too short, they make you change into the stinkiest, skankiest pair of lime green joggers they can find in the lost property box, with stains that you really don’t want to know
where they came from and the stench of a thousand backsides.”
― Ian Slatter, Eco Worrier

“It's bums on seats that spread the desire for tight fitting jeans.”
― Anthony T. Hincks