#helplessness

I am noticing a big difference in the way the hospital workers are looking at me as I approach Jess’s room. The look of sincere sympathy that used to be on their faces when they made eye contact with me is gone. It has been replaced by shear helplessness as they quickly walk past me with their heads tilted down and to the right. I feel like Bud Fox walking into his office with the Securities and Exchange Commission awaiting him. ↗

— John Passaro

#helplessness #hospital-scene #sympathy #life

Loss of hope rather than loss of life is what decides the issues of war. But helplessness induces hopelessness. ↗

— B. H. Liddell Hart

#helplessness #hope #hopelessness #induces #issues

... and I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again. ↗

— Philip Roth

#old-age #wholeness #age

Sometimes there's nothing you can do. [...] Sometimes they don't have enough to fight with. ↗

— Tamora Pierce

#death #flick #helplessness #henna #illness

I am afraid of reduction. After a lifetime's independence- yes, selfish independence- 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. I don't want to sit in my chair and be fed, much less do I want to be handed over to medical professionals. ↗

— Rosie Thomas

#fear #helplessness #death

Self abandoned, relaxed and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, I felt the torrent come; to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#god #helplessness #faith

Helplessness is such a rotten feeling. There's nothing you can do about it. Being helpless is like being paralyzed. It's sickness. The cure calls for a monumental effort to stand up and start walking somewhere, anywhere. But that takes some doing. ↗

— Chuck Barris

#helplessness #life #you-and-me-babe #life

In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#helplessness #loss #religion #religion

There is no such thing as helplessness. It's just another word for giving up. ↗

— Jefferson Smith

#fantasy #helplessness #hope #persistence #surrender

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you. ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#change #courage #depression #dragons #fears