Curses are like young chickens, they always come home to roost.

The saying expresses a moral of reciprocity: harmful wishes, malice, or ill-doing tend to rebound upon the person who utters or initiates them. By likening “curses” to young chickens that inevitably return to their roost, it frames retribution as natural and predictable rather than supernatural—an almost domestic inevitability. The image suggests that negative intent sets forces in motion that circle back through social consequence, reputation, guilt, or providential justice. In quotation history, the line is often treated as an early literary formulation of the proverb “chickens come home to roost,” emphasizing that one’s words and actions eventually return with consequences.