Powerless Book Quotes & Sayings

My book was powerless. The hall was so narrow. I could not run away from you. If I stayed there facing you, it was not out of courage but out of fear, that is the truth - fear of seeing and fear of being seen. But my soul already saw the other truth. Only my soul can tell the story that began in this doorway, slightly to the left of my gaze. There is no other witness. My soul alone saw the struggle. — Helene Cixous

We are all spiritually powerless, however, and not just those physically addicted to a substance, which is why I address this book to everyone. — Richard Rohr

Ambivalence reaches the level of schizophrenia in our treatment of violence among the young. Parents do not encourage violence, but neither do they take up arms against the industries which encourage it. Parents hide their eyes from the books and comics, slasher films, videos and lyrics which form the texture of an adolescent culture. While all successful societies have inhibited instinct, ours encourages it. Or at least we profess ourselves powerless to interfere with it. — C. Sommerville

It was important to choose the exact device to drive Charles away. An imperfect magic, or one incorrectly used, might only bring more disaster upon our house. I thought of my mother's jewels, since this was a day of sparkling things, but they might not be strong on a dull day, and Constance would be angry if I took them out of the box where they belonged, when she herself had decided against it. I thought of books, which are always strongly protective, but my father's book had fallen from the tree and let Charles in; books, then, were perhaps powerless against Charles. I lay back against the tree trunk and thought of magic; if Charles had not gone away before three days I would smash the mirror in the hall. — Shirley Jackson

It is the thesis of this book that modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self; that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional and sensuous potentialities. Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless. This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of his freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man. — Erich Fromm

As a form of moral insurance, at least, literature is much more dependable than a system of beliefs or a philosophical doctrine. Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature - the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books - we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history. — Joseph Brodsky

Madness and passion have always been interchangeable. Throughout the entire western literary tradition. Madness is an abundance of existence. Madness is a way of asking difficult questions. What did he mean, the powerless tyrant king? O Fool, I shall go mad.
Maybe madness is the excess of possibility, ... And writingis about reducing possibility to ne idea, one book, one sentence, one word. Madness is a form of self-expression. It is the opposite of creativity. You cannot make anything that can be separated from yourself if you are mad. And yet, look at Rimbaud
and your wonderful Christopher Smart. But don't harbour any romantic ideas about what it means to be mad. My language was my protection, my guarantee against madness and when there was no one to listen my language vanished along with my reader. — Patricia Duncker

It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation - a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless. — Susan Sontag