#helpless

And I ask myself what it is about me that makes this wonderful, beautiful woman return. Is it because I'm pathetic, helpless in my current state, completely dependent on her? Or is it my sense of humour, my willingness to tease her, to joke my way into painful, secret places? Do I help her understand herself? Do I make her happy? Do I do something for her that her husband and son can't do? Has she fallen in love with me? As the days pass and I continue to heal, my body knitting itself back together, I begin to allow myself to think that she has. ↗

— Mohsin Hamid

#dependence #happiness #helplessness #love #pathetic

Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn't matter. ↗

— Arnold Schwarzenegger

#follows #helplessness #learned #matter #quitting

A Woman is naturally more helpless than the other Sex; and a Man of Honour and Sense should have this in his View in all Manner of Commerce with her. ↗

— Richard Steele

#helpless #her #his #honour #man

Our power knows no limits, yet we cannot find food for a starving child, or a home for a refugee. Our knowledge is without measure and we build the weapons that will destroy us. We live on the edge of ourselves, terrified of the darkness within. We have harmed, corrupted and ruined, we have made mistakes and deceived. ↗

— John le Carré

#power #world-order #food

Of all men’s miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing. ↗

— Herodotus

#men

Never does one feel oneself so utterly helpless as in trying to speak comfort for great bereavement. I will not try it. Time is the only comforter for the loss of a mother. ↗

— Jane Welsh Carlyle

#comfort #comforter #does #feel #great

If she had learnt any lesson today it was that men were stupid, helpless creatures made needlessly cruel by their terror of showing their feelings. ↗

— Jayne Bauling

#feelings #helpless #lesson #men #stupid

I always had a desire to know asylum life more thoroughly - a desire to be convinced that the most helpless of God's creatures, the insane, were cared for kindly and properly. ↗

— Nellie Bly

#asylum #cared #convinced #creatures #desire

Kafka: cries of helplessness in twenty powerful volumes. ↗

— Mason Cooley

#helplessness #kafka #powerful #twenty #volumes

The utter helplessness of a conquered people is perhaps the most tragic feature of a civil war or any other sort of war. ↗

— Rebecca Latimer Felton

#civil #civil war #conquered #feature #helplessness