Aphorisms from vagrants, collected by the Plymouth based artist, Robert Lenkiewicz:

The Bishop:

I'm what they call the unwanted guest and that's the way I'm always going to be.

There are tributaries and estuaries and they go into the great deep sea there to be obliterated.

It takes a lunatic to find out what is really going on. You are now talking to a lunatic, sir!  A lunatic is someone who takes an interest in something no one else takes an interest in.  For the rest there is no escape.

The Singer:

If you're goin' to prepare yourself for life, why not prepare yourself for death? College may prepare you for a bit of life, but what about death?

Why shouldn't a man prepare his own death? I'll go out gracefully with the flowers. I'll even clip my toenails for the pathologist so that he can't look at me and say, "The dirty bastard!"

Without suffering, I'm lost: I wouldn't know what to do without suffering.

Now I live in a church as well, you know, God's church, the only real one there is, not an architects' one, a proper one. No painted stars on my ceiling, but real ones; none of them silly statues, but trees and bushes.

Some time back now I knocked on the door of this vicar an' I asked him for some food; do you know I could see him thinkin' twice on the matter. I says to him, "Do you believe in God?" "Of course I do!" he shouts. "Well then," I says, "come on the road with me.  I believe in him implicitly.  Go lock up your car an' come with me." Well, he nearly cut my head off with the slammin' of his door.

Black Sam:

I went to Moorhaven once – injections, pills and all that. I realised it was a load of rubbish. I sees this psychiatrist bloke, only a young 'un. I was weighing him up.  He was like me; he knew nothing.

A tinker give me this dog. I went to the north of Scotland with him; I loved that dog.  He lay on me 'ead in any barn. He died, though.  It didn't make any sense.

A handshake can judge you.

We're all strange people; we're all escapin'; we're all fanatics.

You searchin' for somethin', but what? If I could have had one spark, just one spark.  There's some force that governs.  Some gigantic force, but what does it govern?

Is there a God? That's what they say. Bah! Nature's the god. Force, that's all, force and more force.  The birds know it; that's why they sing.

Diogenes:

I knows I'm a bloody fool and there's some bloody fools don't know it.

Harmonica Jim:

If you want to know what's on this earth, then be careful what comes out of your mouth. There's beauty on the world and you can get beauty out of it.  The little voice is stupid; if you let that control you, then heaven help you.

You've got to make them understand you, not you them, otherwise they'll soon make shit out of you; they're very powerful people.

I get more from talking to myself than talking to most of the buggers round here.

You can walk through a graveyard and some of them that's buried there could have been you.

Come and visit me any time, the doors are always open, so are the windows.  There's no floors in my house, so watch it!