powerless Quotes

“I discovered that the dragon had put a charm on me: no weapon could cut me. I could walk up to the meadhall whenever I pleased, and they were powerless. My heart became darker because of that. Though I scorned them, sometimes hated them, there had been something between myself and men when we could fight. Now, invulnerable, I was as solitary as one live tree in a vast landscape of coal.”

“It is possible that I appear to you a powerful person. I wear a uniform, I have a certain authority over those under me. But I am in prison, dear lady from Haarlem, a prison stronger than this one.”

“Many ranchers now fear that the beef industry is deliberately being restructured along the lines of the poultry industry. They do not want to wind up like chicken growers—who in recent years have become virtually powerless, trapped by debt and by onerous contracts written by the large processors.”

“The causes of his embitterment were many, remote and near. He was angry with himself for being young and the prey of restless foolish impulses, angry also with the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity. Yet his anger lent nothing to the vision. He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and tasting its mortifying flavour in secret.”

″ ‘Hush!’ Bailey yelled, ‘Hush! Everybody shut up and let me handle this!’ He was squatting in the position of a runner about to sprint forward but he didn’t move.”

“Why does one have to pay to leave his own country? I thought, but I couldn’t argue. I had to pay the money.”

“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

“When a daughter loses a mother, she learns early that human relationships are temporary, that terminations are beyond her control, and her feelings of basic trust and security are shattered. ”

“This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel … total loss of all basic motor skills: blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue- severance of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting, because the brain continues to function more or less normally … you can actually watch yourself behaving in this terrible way, but you can’t control it.”

“Let not thy fear Harm thee, for power in him, be sure, is none To hinder down this rock thy safe descent.”

“I weave on my knees trying to figure out who and what and where but now the ground comes screaming toward me. I’m powerless to stop it so I brace myself, but in the end it isn’t necessary because the blackness swallows me before it hits.”

“They sentence you to death because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time, with no proof that you had anything at all to do with the crime other than being there when it happened. Yet six months later they come and unlock your cage and tell you, We, us, white folks all, have decided it’s time for you to die, because this is a convenient date and time.”

“I’m supposed to make him a man. Who am I? God?”

“God, grant me strength to accept those things I cannot change.”

“The zeks plodded on, heads down, like men going to a funeral. Nothing to lose now, we’re last back in camp anyway.”

“You can turn a man upside down, inside out, any way you like.”

“There was not even the ticking of a clock - prisoners were not allowed clocks. The big boys tell the time for them.”

“The one thing he might want to ask God for was to let him go home . . . But they wouldn’t let him go home.”

“In jail and in the camps Shukhov had lost the habit of scheming how he was going to feed his family from day to day or year to year. The bosses did all his thinking for him, and that somehow made life easier. But what would it be like when he got out?”

“Then how could one live in a world in which one’s mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything?”

“Assure yourselves, O King and Queen, that you daughter shall not die of this disaster. it is true, I have no power to undo entirely what my elder has done. The Princess shall indeed pierce her hand with a spindle; but, instead of dying, she shall only fall into a profound sleep, which shall last one hundred years, at the expiration of which a King’s son shall come and awake her.”

“She felt powerless and silly. But then she looked at the boards again, with the pieces set in the familiar pattern, and the unpleasant feelings lessened. She might be out of place in this public high school, but she was not out of place with those twelve chessboards.”