Quotes About Helplessness

The look on Matthew Leroux's face when I left was terrible to behold. Having lost my own wife, Maeve, to cancer, I actually knew how it felt to helplessly watch a person you deeply love hover between life and death. How the inconsolable pain of it buries you to the point where the thought of your own death is actually a hope and a comfort.

even lying to myself. Maybe there was nothing I could do on this that the Bureau or Secret Service wasn't already covering.

My uncle died in 1987. I unfortunately - I saw it happen before it happened, which was really, really hard because I was 16 years old and I thought, like, Well, I'm seeing this. I'm supposed to stop this. And I couldn't.

Alas, regardless of their doom,The little victims play!No sense have they of ills to come,Nor care beyond today.

Doña Clara was in the hands of malignant Nature who reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.

She feels a sudden, indiscriminate anger, although she's unsure of its target - the Gods who toy with women like her and Parvati for their own amusement, this cruel city that begets so many poor people that it cannot take care of them, or at her own obtuseness.

we're expressing in our adult lives the anger we had to hold in as children. Our anger might also be acting as a defense against deeper feelings of pain and helplessness. We need to get to the root so that we can change the pattern.

Learned helplessness can be part of the ACoA trauma syndrome. In disaster situations, the smallest form of involvement can allow victims to be less symptomatic.

I've dreamed on numerous occasions that I've lost the biggest event in my life, and there was absolutely nothing that I could do about it.

unaffirmed people I have met often have an utter sense of helplessness because they believe there is nothing they themselves can do

It was the fact that there was all this terrible stuff and no one seemed to be able to do anything about it.

It's only when the ghastly mob-sleep, the dream helplessness of the mass psyche overcomes him, that he becomes completely base and obscene

That's the future. City-states rammed with again people huddling up against hospitals and looking up in terror for the big storm that will come and go and leave them floating facedown in thirteen feet of shit. And I can't do anything about it.

That's the future. City-states rammed with aging people huddling up against hospitals and looking up in terror for the big storm that will come and go and leave them floating facedown in thirteen feet of shit. And I can't do anything about it.

The city is not merely a repository of pleasures. It is the stage on which we fight our battles, where we act out the drama of our own lives. It can enhance or corrode our ability to cope with everyday challenges. It can steal our autonomy or give us the freedom to thrive. It can offer a navigable environment, or it can create a series of impossible gauntlets that wear us down daily. The messages encoded in architecture and systems can foster a sense of mastery or helplessness.

In the creation of comedy, it is paradoxical that tragedy stimulates the spirit of ridicule; because ridicule, I suppose is an attitude of defiance: we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature - or go insane

we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature – or go insane.

Of all the things she thought might happen when she came here, this wasn't one. To be shot like this. Tears came into her eyes. She closed them, laid her head down on the grass and in a few moments her tears were the only part of her moving

You are going to die in front of dozens of witnesses, and none of them will do a thing to help you or avenge you. Because they know exactly what you know: The world is ending.

I like your understanding it," said Margaret, smiling sadly. "I don't know whether it is silly, but I don't like to be pitied for the wrong thing. My being so helpless is what every one laments over; but, after all, that is made up to me by the petting and kindness I get from all of them; but it is the being mistress of the house, and having to settle for every one, without knowing whether I do right or wrong, that is my trouble.

feel that way too when I say such things to others who have lost someone they loved. We all do. It feels lame because we like to think we can solve things. It feels insufficient because there is nothing we can actually do to change what's horribly true.

They laughed again, the way one laughs at dead baby jokes: nervously, guiltily, and helplessly.

So basically your plan is to flail about helplessly.

Then would come the remembering again, and the knife would be lost again while she (Gertie) sat helplessly fumbling, once more far from the man in the wood, tossed and whirled about as she was in the ringing, roaring fury." The Dollmaker, Harriette Arnow, p 418