Helplessness Quotes - Page 8

• After a lifetime's independence– yes, selfish independence as my daughter would rightly claim – I am terrified of being reduced to childhood once more, to helplessness, to seas of confusion from which the cruel lucid intervals poke up like rock shoals.

  Rosie Thomas

  Fear, Selfish, Rocks

  "Iris and Ruby: A Novel".

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• Outrage, combining as it does shock, anger, reproach, and helplessness, is perhaps the most unmanageable, the most demoralizing of all the emotions.

  Margery Allingham

  Anger, Doe, Emotion

  Margery Allingham (1959). “Crime and Mr. Campion”

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• Whenever I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love - from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter- to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behaviour of nebulae (whose very remoteness seems a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Heart, Thinking, Drawing

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1951). “Speak, memory: a memoir”

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• He wanted her. He knew where to find her. He waited. It amused him to wait, because he knew that the waiting was unbearable to her. He knew that his absence bound her to him in a manner more complete and humiliating than his presence could enforce. He was giving her time to attempt an escape, in order to let her know her own helplessness when he chose to see her again.

  Ayn Rand

  Order, Giving, Waiting

  Ayn Rand (2005). “The Fountainhead”, p.241, Penguin

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• I never heard of anybody who admired the character of sheep. Even the gentlest human personalities in contact with them are annoyed by their lack of brains, courage and initiative, by their extraordinary ability to get themselves into uncomfortable or dangerous situations and then wait in inert helplessness for someone to rescue them.

  Dorothy Canfield Fisher

  Character, Dangerous Situations, Sheep

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• Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all.

  Doris Lessing

  Pain, Cat, Knowing

  Doris May Lessing (1991). “Particularly Cats-- and Rufus”, Alfred A. Knopf

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• Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Two, People, Childhood

  Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

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• A woman's greatest charm consists in a constant appeal to a man's generosity by a gracious declaration of helplessness which fills him with pride and awakens the most magnificent feelings in his heart.

  Honore de Balzac

  Heart, Pride, Men

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• [T]he democratic principle of "one man, one vote," viewed against a background of voting masses numbering several millions, only serves to demonstrate the pitiful helplessness of the inarticulate individual, who functions at the polls as the smallest indivisible arithmetical (and not always algebraic) unit. He acts in total anonymity, secrecy and legal irresponsibility.

  Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

  Men, Voting, Principles

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• The main trouble with despair is that it is self-fulfilling. People who fear the worst tend to invite it. Heads that are down can't scan the horizon for new openings. Bursts of energy do not spring from a spirit of defeat. Ultimately, helplessness leads to hopelessness.

  Norman Cousins

  Spring, Self, People

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• You have no control [over natural disaster]. That's what's scary about it. You're helpless. That feeling of helplessness is really scary.

  R. L. Stine

  Scary, Feelings, Natural

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I can't afford it' shut down your brain. it didn't have to think anymore. besides, it also brings up sadness. a helplessness that leads to despondency and often depression. 'How can I afford it?' opened up the brain. forced it to think and search fro answers. it also opens up possibilities, excitement and dreams and created a stronger mind and dynamic spirit.

  Robert Kiyosaki

  Dream, Sadness, Thinking

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• Ultimately what I end up writing about is helplessness and the flipside of that, empowerment.

  Joss Whedon

  Writing, Empowerment, Ends

  "Joss Whedon: ‘I want to make things that are small, pure and odd.’". Interview with, www.indiewire.com. March 12, 2012.

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• If the helplessness and isolation of labour, who have nothing to sell but their labour, can be totally removed by connecting labour with capital through a universal credit system, we'll then have other kinds of actors on the economic scene different from what the existing capitalist world would allow us to bring out.

  Muhammad Yunus

  Different, Credit, Actors

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• Your True Nature Is Love. There's Nothing You Can Do About It.

  Byron Katie

  Sister, Daughter, Brother

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• While I was chained to a wall and being tortured, I realized, through the screaming of my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.

  Gregory David Roberts

  Wall, Hate, Men

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• As the plane got closer to Miami, I had this terrible feeling he was dying. Maybe he was telling me that he was going. I felt anger, panic, despair and helplessness.

  Robin Gibb

  Anger, Feelings, Despair

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• To pray is to open the door unto Jesus and admit Him into your distress. Your helplessness is the very thing which opens wide the door unto Him and gives Him access to all your needs.

  Ole Hallesby

  Jesus, Doors, Giving

  Ole Hallesby (1975). “Prayer”, Augsburg Fortress Publishing

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• By prayer we couple the powers of Heaven to ou helplessness, the powers which can capture strongholds and make the impossible, possible.

  Ole Hallesby

  Prayer, Couple, Angel

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• To condemn someone to death is to surrender; it proves that you failed. You are not able to change him, to change her; you have to kill him or her. You surrender. ... You only demonstrate your lack of capacity, your helplessness. This is failure.

  Nhat Hanh

  Able, Death Penalty, Surrender

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• In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse-quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.

  John Updike

  Mother, War, Pulse

  John Updike (1991). “Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism”, Alfred A. Knopf

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• Raw hatred took its time making an outpost of its rage and prepared for me a savage crown with rusty, bloodstained spikes. It wasn't pride that made me keep my heart at a distance from such terror, nor did I waste on revenge or the pursuit of power the forces that came from my selfish griefs or my accumulated joys. It was something else-my helplessness.

  Pablo Neruda

  Revenge, Selfish, Distance

  Pablo Neruda (2015). “I Explain a Few Things: Selected Poems”, p.299, Macmillan

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• Without faith there can be no prayer, no matter how great our helplessness may be. Helplessness united with faith produces prayer.

  Ole Hallesby

  Prayer, Produce, United

  "Prayer".

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• The moment a man falls into sin, divine life ceases to flow, and his life becomes one of helplessness.

  Smith Wigglesworth

  Fall, Men, Flow

  Smith Wigglesworth (2013). “Ever Increasing Faith”, p.53, Lulu Press, Inc

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• People always talk about good time rock and roll, Chuck Berry or whatever, like this liberating force for feeling good. But what I need in my life is to be liberated into feeling bad. Not sad. I have plenty of sad. What I need is a place where I can spray anger in sparks like a gnarled piece of electrical cable. Just be mad at stuff and soak in the helplessness.

  John Darnielle

  Rocks, Rock And Roll, People

  John Darnielle (2008). “Black Sabbath's Master of Reality”, p.75, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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