Helplessness Quotes

“I am not angry,
I am not sad,
I have no questions,
I need no answers,
For, I am numb.

I can’t cry,
I can’t smile,
I can’t laugh,
I can’t giggle,
For, I feel numb.

I don’t argue,
I don’t think,
I don’t talk,
I can’t fight,
For, I feel numb and
Somehow, I just know
Being ‘numb’ is worse
Than anything else!”
― Jyoti Patel

“We've all felt a little incompetent, insufficient, overexposed, helpless, unlovable, terrified, defective, unfit and unsung at times. And deep down, for whatever reason, you might even think you deserve to. Because why else would you be feeling that way. Like the world is laughing at you.

I promise you it's not.”
― Anne Clendening, Bent: How Yoga Saved My Ass

“We are not helpless. We all have the ability to make this world a better place. We can start with small steps, one day at a time.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman

“Whenever you feel down, remember it is always daylight somewhere on this rock we call Earth. Whenever you are belittled by a human, remember that she or he does not represent the whole for the Earth is way bigger than any puny creature you may encounter.”
― Lamine Pearlheart, Aether

“Bemoaning my existence wasn’t changing my existence.”
― Carolyn Spring

“As a child, the best way to survive was to be still, to submit—to do nothing that might incur further harm. That belief had grown with me through my teens, my twenties, my thirties, an unacknowledged mentor directing my every path, reinforcing a ubiquitous sense of powerlessness and victimhood. I had believed that I was bad, and unloveable, and cowardly, and weak—beliefs that had been unconscious, and had always gone unchallenged. I believed them because they were true, and they were true because I believed them.”
― Carolyn Spring

“Do not hold a lazy faith. Miracles are not spontaneous events we must wait for helplessly. Miracles are an achievement—a breakthrough accomplished by those who pushed themselves beyond what was thought possible while holding a belief in a better life. Get up off your knees, and roll up your sleeves.”
― L.M. Browning

“She was now more than ever confronted with the outward cries of help that leaped at her like an overflowing bathtub where the water had grown cold and rancid. The catastrophe had caught up with her. It had always been there, a re-emerging siren in scarlet tones, a temptation of the abysmal artillery of the brain, a carousel waltzing with crazed horses, the heel-clicking and tap-dancing back chambers where arthropods lay on their carapaces.”
― Laura Gentile, Within Paravent Walls

“It is a very terrible thing to be far smaller than one's rage.”
― Frances Hardinge, Fly by Night

“They are called stuckerpillers because they get stuck together. They depend so much on each other even when they become unhappy living together. They can’t leave each other because they’ve become one. They lose their own identity and then they get confused. They become helpless. When one stuckerpiller wants to go in one direction and the other stuckerpiller wants to go in the opposite direction, they end up pulling against each other, never really getting anywhere.”
― Jacqueline Edgington, Happy Jack

“There is a helplessness in poverty that precedes the move of God in our lives because we understand an aspect of grace that so many miss: we do nothing to earn it. When we understand this, all becomes grace.”
― Alia Joy, Glorious Weakness: Discovering God in All We Lack

“Immersion in the ugliness of injustice, in the hope of change, seems preferable to turning away. . . . there is a reward for courage and determination in the face of helplessness and suffering: Walking into pain in the hope of bringing change moves a person from helplessness and despair to empowered activism”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“Tears wet my eyes. I’m a surgeon. I like solving things. But how do I solve
this?”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“Learning beforehand that responding matters actually prevents learned helplessness”
― Seligman Martin, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

“For all the experiences she had, for all the knowledge she had accumulated over the years, she was back to feeling as though she knew nothing at all. She was a stranger in a strange world, one so infinite and broad in scope that it likely didn't even realize, or care, that she existed.”
― kay solo, Ghost Walk

“Until you realize your helplessness, can you seek for help.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita

“… Could I have missed them more? What a fool I had been while they walked and talked and lived …”
― P. Sheelwant, The Foe Within

“The real God...will give us more than we can handle just to show us that only he can handle things.”
― Mark Hall, Your Own Jesus: A God Insistent on Making It Personal

“Left side, he is injured. Hold me close right.”
― Baali

“God helps those who help themselves' is common sense, 'God helps those who cannot help themselves' is sound theology, and 'God helps all the living', a simple ideation.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“Can a therapist make me not want to get pregnant? Can a therapist undo the trouble with my eggs, my hormones, and whatever else isn't working? I can't help it, but it feels like an insult for the doctor to send me there. Like telling people with cancer they can think themselves healthy if they try hard enough to visualize their immune cells as little sharks gobbling up the tumor. It's just blaming the victim.”
― Monica Starkman, The End of Miracles

“I had expected a certain amount of exitment from the staff when they found out I wasn't totaly helpless. Instead, they looked unfomfortable. They exchanged glances, then looked at the sky, then at the ground.
"umm.... does this mean we're going on? Guido said at last.”
― Robert Lynn Asprin, Myth-ing Persons

“Und wandelte Magdalena im finsteren Tal, zwischen den Wesen, die schauten sie an, streckten die Hände aus nach ihr.

Was kann ich tun? sagte Magdalena. Da war ein Sturz aus fernen Höhlen, viele Tücher wurden zurückgeschlagen, und war Nacktheit in allen Öffnungen, die sprachen das Wort: Bedürftigkeit. War ausgestreckter Hände voll der Ort und suchender Augen, die wollten. Und Magdalena ging und sollte bringen, sie hatte aber nichts, war leer und arm.

Ich muss wandern, dachte sie, und demütig schlugen die Gestalten ihre Augen nieder, und blieben stehen am Wegrand, zurück, wie dunkle Pfähle, die Hände halb gestreckt aus den Gewändern, müde Geste, verzagte Forderung, so würden sie stehenbleiben, lange, oh, so lange, und würde in ihren Herzen schlummern der Gedanke: sie wird wiederkommen, sie wird wiederkommen, und sie würden stehen und warten, die Äonen würden niederfallen, und Schnee sinken im kalten Wind ...

Du bist die, die ihnen verheißen wurde, sagte die Stimme, und Magdalena floh, denn was konnte sie geben? Sie hatte nichts, leer waren ihre Gebärden. Und verzweigt waren die Täler, voll kühler Ungeduld.

Der Morgen floss von den Höhen, blasses Auge der Nebelsonne. Zurück sah Magdalena hinunter ins Tal, da standen die Tannen, die dunklen Hallen. Und Magdalena fühlte eine schwache Spur von Glück, ich bin nicht der Gärtner eures Unbehagens, sagte sie, und die Bäume rauschten im Wind. Entronnen, sagte Magdalena laut, entronnen ...”
― Peter von Mundenheim

“The beating soon had Laurelene nearly senseless. The carbineer began to tear away her hempcloth robe and when she tried to crawl away he dragged her back and punched her face until she lay unresisting, her legs bare and apart. He's done this before, so this is what it's like to be violated, she thought as he settled down on top of her with a long, shuddering sigh. Anything, anything, just no more beating, she thought, her eyes closed.”
― Sean McMullen, The Miocene Arrow

“Despite having two young children to mother, [Sylvia Plath] seemed inept at the basics of life, always needing help.”
― Rob Jovanovic, A Version of Reason: In Search of Richey Edwards

“And because he could do nothing about it, Tern’s anger suffocated him. It made more tears.”
― Noor Al-Shanti, Children of the Dead City

“He looked outside once more. It was like a Bosch painting, except that Bosch lacked the imagination or nerve for this horror. In some forlorn part of his brain Neil heard Abba singing “Fernando” in a tinny voice.”
― Thomas Tessier, World of Hurt: Selected Stories

“… Poor little darling … Only if I had known some way to tell you Abdul’s opinion of you, without hurting you, I would have told you. It may break your heart but stop you from breaking up, that is.”
― P. Sheelwant, The Foe Within

“… Oh God, but what do I do about Dad’s ‘Helena ever, never’ … I feel like it’s eating me alive …”
― P. Sheelwant, The Foe Within

“… Guddi and I would have been floating down the river dead by now hadn’t I come across the sketches on that platform … Oh God, how I miss not being aboard AI 666 on that day!”
― P. Sheelwant, The Foe Within