“
There's a race of men that don't fit in,
A race that can't sit still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain's crest; Their's is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don't know how to rest.
”
”
Robert W. Service
“
For a time, then, we stay. For a time. Till the changes.
”
”
Joanne Harris (Chocolat (Chocolat, #1))
“
I am running and singing and when it’s raining I’m the only one left on the open street, smiling with my eyes fixed on the sky because it’s cleaning me. I’m the one on the other side of the party, hearing laughter and the emptying of bottles while I peacefully make my way to the river, a lonely road, following the smell of the ocean. I’m the one waking up at 4am to witness the sunrise, where the sky touches the sea, and I hold my elbows, grasping tight to whatever I’ve made of myself.
”
”
Charlotte Eriksson (Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving)
“
Well, at least this is what I told myself every day as I fell asleep with the fire still burning and the moon shining high up in the sky and my head spinning comforting from two bottles of wine, and I smiled with tears in my eyes because it was beautiful and so god damn sad and I did not know how to be one of those without the other.
”
”
Charlotte Eriksson (Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving)
“
Do you want to paint your life using two colors (good and bad) or do you want to paint the best piece of your life with colors beyond your wildest imagination?
”
”
Helen Edwards (Nothing Sexier Than Freedom)
“
Born at Letterman Army Hospital. I never actually lived in San Francisco. It's not my home town, but then, I don't have one. I'm a nomad...a gypsy...an Army Brat. Put me on an airplane, send me anywhere. That's where I belong...anywhere.
”
”
Marc Curtis (Growing Up Military: Every Brat Has a Story)
“
Gypsies, as you know, often seem sinister to the rest of us, but that's only because they have character. Travelling from town to town, living in caravans, buying or selling whatever is at hand.
The adventure of it all
”
”
Karl Wiggins (Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe)
“
I embrace the rain like no one else and I call for storms because I live for the moments when I get through to the other side with all my organs intact.
I change with the seasons and the seasons live in me, depending on the weather as if it's something to be trusted. I don't feel safe unless I'm far below or high above, near the ocean, or climbing the mountain. Where I can't be reached or seen by anyone or anything and not even myself, because it seems to me that these voices in my head get louder just to kill the noise from the outside,
and so I need to go away from time to time.
You will never see me surrender, never see me cry, but you will often see me walk away. Turn around and just leave, without looking back.
”
”
Charlotte Eriksson (Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps)
“
We were hockey gypsies, heading down another gravel road every weekend, plowing into the heart of that magnificent northern landscape. We never gave a thought to being deprived as we travelled, to being shut out of the regular league system. We never gave a thought to being Indian. Different. We only thought of the game and the brotherhood that bound us together off the ice, in the van, on the plank floors of reservation houses, in the truck stop diners where if we'd won we had a little to splurge on a burger and soup before we hit the road again. Small joys. All of them tied together, entwined to form an experience we would not have traded for any other. We were a league of nomads, mad for the game, mad for the road, mad for ice and snow, an Arctic wind on our faces and a frozen puck on the blade of our sticks.
”
”
Richard Wagamese (Indian Horse)
“
Beware the crazy traveller! Mind expansion can be contagious...
”
”
Nicole Leigh West (The Gypsy Trail)
“
We both were traveling for our own self care and to feed our wandering souls...existing in other places so that we could remember who we were and then come home to ourselves.
”
”
Candy Leigh (Finding Life In Between: A Journal For Me…To You)
“
Further and further afield he travelled. Taking ship, he sailed to a hot and passionate country where gypsy women dressed in scarlet, and their dark skin sweated as they danced tarantellas under a tambourine moon.
”
”
Geraldine McCaughrean (The Canterbury Tales)
“
If you call a gypsy a vagabond, I think you do him wrong,
For he never goes a-travelling but he takes his home along.
And the only reason a road is good, as every wanderer knows,
Is just because of the homes, the homes, the homes to which it goes.
”
”
Joyce Kilmer
“
The idea of a voyage was something crucial for Guy’, Alice told me. He’d seen it the way Gypsies do: not so much experiential as ontological. It’s not that Gypsies necessarily voyage from place to place as they are voyagers; the voyage is immanent in who they are, in what they do, irrespective of whether they travel or not. Guy had similarly understood life as an ontological voyage. Time moves on, ineluctably, and people are consumed by fire.
”
”
Andy Merrifield (Guy Debord (Critical Lives))
“
All you freeborn men of the travelling people
Every tinker, rolling stone and gypsy rover
Winds of change are blowing, old ways are going
Your travelling days will soon be over
”
”
Ewan MacColl
“
LOVE IS NOMADIC
AND I'M A GYPSY SOUL
SO LOVE GOES WHEREVER
I GO
”
”
Qwana Reynolds-Frasier (Friend In Your Pocket Conversations Session One)
“
Romanian gypsy with her traveling harem,
”
”
Kristy Cunning (Two Kingdoms (The Dark Side, #3))
“
We are cosmic gypsies who fell in love with planet earth!
”
”
V. Yve P. Roman
“
There is a strong and fairly substantial theory in India as elsewhere that the gypsies of Europe originated in tribes driven out by Indian population displacements of the remote past.
”
”
Norman Lewis (A Goddess in the Stones: Travels in India)
“
And me, I’ve got to start all over. Not only build a new life, but construct a new person. I call my old self “that other guy,” for I share nothing but his memories, and everything he ever liked I’ve had to discover all over again, one by one, so that I’ve held on to, for example, reading, motorcycling, and birdwatching, but I’m not yet sure about art or music (I can look at it or listen to it, but not with the same “engagement” I used to), and I have no interest in work, charity, world events, or anybody I don’t know. In my present gypsy life, I encounter a lot of people every day, and some of them I instinctively like and respond to in a brief encounter at a gas station or small-town diner, but for the most part I look around at ugly and mean-spirited people and think, “Why are you alive?
”
”
Neil Peart (Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road)
“
HE WAS KNOWN As DJANGO, a Gypsy name meaning "I awake." His legal name-the name the gendarmes and border officials entered into their journals as his family crisscrossed Europe in their horsedrawn caravan-was jean Reinhardt. But when the family brought their travels to a halt alongside a hidden stream or within a safe wood to light their cookfire, they called him only by his Romany name. Even among his fellow Gypsies, "Django" was a strange name, a strong, telegraphic sentence due to its first-person verb construction. It was a name of which Django was exceedingly proud. It bore an immediacy, a sense of life, and a vision of destiny.
”
”
Michael Dregni (Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend)
“
For all that, I don’t think Gypsies ought to be likened to birds of ill-omen. They return evil for evil, and good for good. One hundredfold. Their powers seem to exceed them. I knew some in Spain who could read the stars; in Germany, who could heal burns; in the Camargue, who tended horses and could lessen the birthing pains of both women and beasts.
There are some human beings who are not bound by human laws. The sad thing is perhaps they’re not all aware of it.
Meanwhile, here’s an idea I volunteer: the day when the borders of Europe and elsewhere become, as they once were, open to the movement of nomadic tribes that some regard as ‘worrisome’, it would be interesting if researchers qualified in astronomy (yes, indeed), with calenders and terrestrial and celestial maps to hand, were to examine the routes travelled by wandering Gypsies.
Maybe they’ll discover that these slow and apparently aimless journeys are related to cosmic forces. Like wars. And migrations.
The Gypsies were persecuted, in France and elsewhere, with cyclical regularity in a vicious, inept and stupid manner. Almost as much as the Jews.
”
”
Jacques Yonnet (Paris Noir: The Secret History of a City)
“
I still don't know why we didn't hire a car
to get around Ireland."
"When I was a kid, I always dreamed about living in Ireland. I used to pretend I was one of
the traveling people, driving my gypsy wagon from village to village. Used to picture a dark
gypsy kidnapping me and having his way with me. Exciting stuff." Katy grinned at her. "Could
still happen, you know."
"Katy, we have a horse that's so laid-back I have to keep checking to see if he's dead.
”
”
Nina Bangs (Night Games)
“
The boughs of trees stretched high overhead, leaves of dappled green and black mottling the sky. It was called the black forest for more reasons than the inky-black foliage. The wise and cautious seldom travelled by night along its poorly-tended roads, and banditry wasn’t the main reason. In the minds of many, shadows of a threat lurked in wait, seeking an opportunity to strike during a moment of weakness. It was known among the old folk that not all who dwelled within the black forest were of human or animal-kind. Some beings were much older and believed far more dangerous.
”
”
Mara Amberly (Her Gypsy Promise: A Short Story)
“
The novel is that art form that burns most easily. It so happened that in the middle of the nineteenth century, all the citizens of our shtetl - every man, woman, and child - was convinced he had at least one novel in him This period was likely the result of the traveling Gypsy salesman who brought a wagonload of books to the shtetl square on the third Sunday of every other month, advertising them as 'Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.' What else could come to the lips of a Chosen People but 'I can do that?
”
”
Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated)
“
After mentioning these and other examples, Modris Eksteins correctly observes that the Holocaust was not exclusively a German affair. Hitler may have found ‘willing executioners’ among his own people, but also among the citizens of the lands he conquered. ‘The Holocaust was enacted in the fevered dreamscapes of Eastern Europe where right and wrong were seldom on opposite sides, and where fear and hatred were a way of life. This was a frontier land where borders and peoples had fluctuated throughout history, and where the Jew and the Gypsy were symbols of transience and instability. Holocaust was a state of mind here before it was a Nazi policy.
”
”
Geert Mak (In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century)
“
Over the years, I have grown to love airports, despite all the travel inconveniences which are getting worse every year. I don’t know why I have this strong desire to depart; to always be somewhere else. Maybe getting displaced and being forced out of my home as a result of war has turned me into a permanent nomad? Since I left Iraq for the first time in 2005, I almost always have a plane, bus, or train ticket to go somewhere. Sometimes I think of the mothers who abandon their unwanted babies at the doors of churches and mosques. I imagine that my mother, too, had left me at the door of an airport with a plane ticket instead of a pacifier in my mouth! And since then, I have been moving everywhere and arriving nowhere. Could it be that disillusion takes place precisely at the moment we arrive at a certain destination?
”
”
Louis Yako
“
If this isn't a guidebook, what is it? A book of sermons, perhaps.
I preach that air travel be scaled back, as a start, to the level of twenty years ago, further reductions to be considered after all the Boeing engineers have been retrained as turkey ranchers.
The state Game Department should establish a season on helicopters — fifty-two weeks a year, twenty-four hours a day, no bag limit.
Passenger trains must be restored, as a start, to the service of forty years ago and then improved from there.
The Gypsy Bus System must not be regularized (the government would regulate it to death) but publicized cautiously through the underground.
I would discourage, if not ban, trekking to Everest base camp and flying over the Greenland Icecap. Generally, people should stay home. Forget gaining a little knowledge about a lot and strive to learn about a little.
”
”
Harvey Manning (Walking the Beach to Bellingham (Northwest Reprints))
“
Sea-Fever I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face and a grey dawn breaking. I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the seagulls crying. I must go down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover, And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
”
”
The American Poetry and Literacy Project (Songs for the Open Road: Poems of Travel and Adventure (Dover Thrift Editions: Poetry))
“
The light travelers felt the familiar tingling and vibrational pull at the top of their heads, and the great rush of cool air pressed in on them. The familiar green fluorescent geometric shapes and symbols collided with their vibrating bodies. As the third spiral drew them up, it dissolved into very fine hair-like ribbons of light that seemed to meld into all things, all time, all space. The teens realized they had access to all knowledge—past, present, future. Using her intent Drew, asked to see the inside of the South Portal at Aramu Muru. In the next second she saw a clash of light and dark, distorted inhuman faces, hellacious other-worldly images.
”
”
Dottie Graham (Outpost Gypsy Tree: The South Portal)
“
I may be lost, but I'm traveling the right way.
”
”
Melody Lee (Moon Gypsy)
“
I take the wild route. I carry a purpose wherever I go...
”
”
Neil Mach (Moondog and the Reed Leopard)
“
I’d forgive you for not having an inkling of who I am if you glimpsed me from a distance. You have your own idea of what a Gypsy is, I’m sure. We all make instant judgements. ’Tis our second thoughts that count. But I’m confident you’d be wrong with first, and second, impressions.
”
”
E.L. Parfitt (A Gypsy's Curse)
“
The Tinkler-Gypsies is a book written by a lawyer from Newton Stewart called Andrew McCormick in 1906. It is a detailed account of the Galloway traveller community at
”
”
Shaun Bythell (The Diary of a Bookseller)
“
The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast and you miss all you are traveling for.
”
”
Jolie Sikes (Junk Gypsy: Designing a Life at the Crossroads of Wonder & Wander)
“
Aghast at the cruelty of the People
Preaching the sermon of my sins
Packed with the world of incomplete circles
I am a gypsy soul
Traveling in search of my home
”
”
AnkitMishra
“
The tenement at 179 [East 93rd Street, NYC] was the first real home I can remember. Until we moved there we had lived like gypsies, never traveling far -- in fact never out of the neighborhood -- but always moving, haunted and pursued by eviction notices, attachments, and glinty-eyed landlord's agents. The Marxes were poor, very poor. We were always hungry. And we were numerous. But thanks to the amazing spirit of my father and my mother, poverty never made any of us depressed or angry. My memory of my earliest years is vague but pleasant, full of the sound of singing and laughter, and full of people I loved.
”
”
Harpo Marx (HARPO SPEAKS!)
“
In Michigan as everywhere else in the country, Americans increasingly used cars for weekend or extended holiday travel as well as day-to-day work- or errand-related driving. “Gypsying” was an early, popular term for such outings. Participants were known as “vacationists,” or, if extended trips involved pitching tents at night, “autocampers.
”
”
Jeff Guinn (The Vagabonds: The Story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison's Ten-Year Road Trip)
“
Their flag has two background colours: green representing the ground below, and blue for the sky above. In its centre it depicted a wheel: this symbolized the image of the Romani people as travellers and, resembling the 24-spoke wheel known as the Ashoka Chatra which features in the centre of the flag of India, it served as a reference to the Roms' historical country of origin.
”
”
Yaron Matras (I Met Lucky People: The Story of the Romani Gypsies)
“
A long time ago I was in the ancient city of Prague and at the same time Joseph Alsop, the justly famous critic of places and events, was there. He talked to informed people, officials, ambassadors; he read reports, even the fine print and figures, while I in my slipshod manner roved about with actors, gypsies, vagabonds. Joe and I flew home to America on the same plane, and on the way he told me about Prague, and his Prague had no relation to the city I had seen and heard. It just wasn’t the same place, and yet each of us was honest, neither one a liar, both pretty good observers by any standard, and we brought home two cities, two truths.
”
”
John Steinbeck (Travels With Charley: In Search of America)
“
Army Brat: an acronym for Born, raised and transferred. Brats, irreverent, sometimes more reckless than courageous and unabashedly basking in the reflected glory and adoration our fathers deservedly received. But mostly we were gypsies--agile quick-witted and tough bunch of youngsters growing up in a world that barricaded the rest of the universe out and kept us cocooned within ours.
The brats moved every two years across the country, from one cantonment to another, inadvertently learning to adapt and engage faster than their 'civilian' counterparts changed their iphones.
Resilience was a byproduct of this lifestyle.
Our wings were our roots. And those wings had brought my father to Tawang, a sensitive military base near out border with China.
”
”
Nidhie Sharma (INVICTUS)
“
The persistence of high and low status for some groups in various societies would seem to contradict the simple law of mobility for social status. However, in each of the anomalous cases discussed above, there are factors at play that can make even extreme persistence consistent with the same universal tendency for families to regress toward the mean over time. Elites and underclasses seem to be created by mechanisms that select them from the top or bottom of the established status distribution. They can also be created, as in the case of the Gypsy/Traveller community in England, by differential fertility between higher- and lower-status members of a group.
”
”
Gregory Clark (The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World))
“
The Travelling People, the final radio ballad, broadcast in 1964, was the most ambitious of all, grappling with the vilified nomadic population of Britain. The programme did not flinch from including the negative sentiments of the ‘not in my backyard’ brigade: one gentleman is heard to call them ‘misfits … the maggots of society’. The soundworld is particularly rich and evocative of difference: the travellers’ words are surrounded by the outdoor ambience in which they dwell – birdsong, horses’ hooves, the rush of road traffic. The voices of ‘respectable’ society speak in the dead air of cushioned interiors. Parker’s editing skills reach a new level of finesse, so a succession of phrases like ‘They call us the wild ones/ The pilgrims of the mist/ Romanies, Gypsies, diddikais, mumpers, travellers/ Nomads of the road/Blackfaced diddies/ … In Carlisle, they call you porters, dirty porters this, dirty porters that …’ whizz past in a kaleidoscope of lexicographic plurality and regional accents. Its conclusion – comparing Britain’s treatment of its nomads to the Nazi pogroms – is shocking, but is borne out by the words of Labour councillor Harry Watton, who is heard to say, ‘One must exterminate the impossibles.’ It is a bitter, troubling conclusion to the radio ballads.
”
”
Rob Young (Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music)
“
Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out is mute,” wrote Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. “Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup.” By
”
”
Rolf Potts (Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel)
“
Is it a hallucinogen?” he asked. “Yes, there is a component in wormwood that can cause hallucinations. It is toxic if used too much,” I replied. I’d seen people die from overdoing it on absinthe. Even fairies. The gypsy folk that I traveled with in Europe used to brew it. It was the moonshine of the Roma.
”
”
Kimbra Swain (Fairy Tales of a Trailer Park Queen, Books 4-6 (Fairy Tales of a Trailer Park Queen, #4-6))
“
I just came back from a trip and my heart aches for another, may be that's what Hills do they smoke the gypsy spirit in you, because no matter what as long as there is life there is hope and as long as there is Hope there is an urge to explore all that is unknown, to embark on adventures without ceasing to get amazed at every maze of Life. ❤️
To those who dream, to those who never settle, to those who wear their souls and to those who watch the sky fall both in the ruddy glance of a sunset and a sunrise!
”
”
Debatrayee Banerjee (A Whispering Leaf. . .)
“
His grandfather, he said, was from a traveling family—part of a group called the “Gringos”—signifying, here, not unwanted Americans but Greek-speaking Gypsies in Spain.
”
”
Isabel Fonseca (Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey)
“
They had come a long way, those gypsies encamped for their evening meal on the dusty greensward by the winding mountain road in Provence. From Transylvania they had come, from the pustas of Hungary, from the High Tatra of Czechoslovakia, from the Iron Gate, even from as far away as the gleaming Rumanian beaches washed by the waters of the Black Sea. A long journey, hot and stifling and endlessly, monotonously repetitive across the already baking plains of Central Europe or slow and difficult and exasperating and occasionally dangerous in the traversing of the great ranges of mountains that had lain in their way. Above all, one would have thought, even for those nomadic travellers par excellence, a tiring journey. No traces of any such tiredness could be seen in the faces of the gypsies, men, women and children all dressed in their traditional finery, who sat or squatted in a rough semi-circle round two glowing coke braziers, listening in quietly absorbed melancholy to the hauntingly soft and nostalgic tsigane music of the Hungarian steppes. For this apparent
”
”
Alistair MacLean (Caravan to Vaccares)
“
It is but a short step now to the 'House Time', when all Gypsies may conform with the masses and abandon travelling altogether for the settled life. But hold - surely there will be a few free spirits who will follow the urge and continue to roam, maintaining that proud independence that started with a long march out of India?
”
”
James Hayward (Gypsy Jib: A Romany Dictionary (English and Romany Edition))