#helplessness

... 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

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

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

Helplessness induces hopelessness, and history attests that loss of hope and not loss of lives is what decides the issue of war. ↗

— B. H. Liddell Hart

#helplessness #history #hope #hopelessness #induces