Transients, All of Us

"It was because of his tolerance of transients that they haunted the town as they did, sleeping in abandoned houses and in the ruins of fallen houses, and building their shanties and lean-tos under the bridge and along the shore.  They seldom spoke in our hearing or looked at us directly, but we stole glimpses of their faces.  They were like the people in old photographs -- we did not see them through a veil of knowledge and habit, but simply and plainly, as they were lined or scarred as they were startled or blank."  

Burnside's Bridge

"Like the dead, we could consider their histories complete, and we wondered only what had brought them to transiency, to drifting, since their lives as drifters were like pacings and broodings and skirmishings among ghosts who cannot pay their way across the Styx.  How ever long a postscript to however short a life, it was still no part of the story.  We imagined that if they spoke to us they would astonish us with tales of disaster and disgrace and bitter sorrow, that would fly into the hills and stay there in the dark earth and in the cries of birds.  For in the case of such pure sorrow, who can distinguish mine from thine?"

-Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping