All 4 Uses of
vagrant
in
Atlas Shrugged
- He felt, with a touch of mirthless amusement, that the gun had been needed at the mills, not in the peaceful safety of loneliness and night; what could some starving vagrant take from him, compared to what had been taken by men who claimed to be his protectors?†
Chpt 2.7 *vagrant = someone who is poor and has no regular home or job
- There were bright lights under the marquee of the entrance, but it was dark beyond, on the pavement, so I could see without being seen, there were a few loafers and vagrants hanging around, there was a drizzle of rain and we clung to the walls of the building.†
Chpt 3.5vagrants = people who are poor and have no regular home or job
- And then, for one instant, I did what I had never done before, what most men wreck their lives on doing-I saw that moment out of context, I saw the world as he made it look, as if it matched him, as if he were its symbol-I saw a world of achievement, of unenslaved energy, of unobstructed drive through purposeful years to the enjoyment of one's reward-I saw, as I stood in the rain in a crowd of vagrants, what my years would have brought me, if that world had existed, and I felt a desperate longing-he was the image of everything I should have been ...and he had everything that should have been mine......But it was only a moment.†
Chpt 3.5
- Your morality demands that you divorce your love from values and hand it down to any vagrant, not as response to his worth, but as response to his need, not as reward, but as alms, not as a payment for virtues, but as a blank check on vices.†
Chpt 3.7vagrant = someone who is poor and has no regular home or job
Definitions:
-
(1)
(vagrant) someone who is poor and has no regular home or job
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
Less commonly, and especially long ago, you may see vagrant used to emphasize that a poor person wanders from place to place. Even more rarely, it can describe an animal as being in a place it usually is not, or to describe anything that varies or seems random such as the seeming haphazard direction in which a certain weed spreads, or the fleeting quality of something smelled for only an instant.