"Powerless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... figure of a woman white as a wraith and wonderful with a sort of holy passion darted from the grasp of a man who sought to detain her, and stood before them, palpitating with a protest which for a moment she seemed powerless to utter. ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... heaped themselves up into towers of ruin. The cordage flacked, the strong ribs creaked; like a beast over-burdened the whole ship groaned, wallowing in a sea-trough without breath to climb. So we endured for many days, a straggling host of men, ordinarily capable, powerless now beneath that dumb tyrant the sky. Where else could be our refuge? We all looked to King Richard—by day to his royal ensign, by night to the great wax candle which he always had lighted and stuck in a lantern. His commands were ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... tax-gatherers to the land. In this great cycle of give and take of the elements, the affairs of men cut but a momentary figure; how puny they are, how transient! How the great changes, which in time amount to revolutions, go on over our heads and under our feet, and we rarely heed them, and are powerless to stay them! A summer shower carries the soil of my side-hill, which is mainly disintegrated Silurian rock and shale, into the river, and some millions of years hence, when it has become stratified rock, and been lifted up into the light of day, some other, and, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... since my departure, Abou Saood and his people had ridiculed the authority of my commandant, Major Abdullah; and to prove to the natives how powerless he was to protect them, Abou Saood had sent his men to attack Rot Jarma, and they had carried off ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... Wessex. Then, too, closed in the wounded men and the country folk; and the Danes broke and fled towards the ships in disorder. We followed for a little way, and then the thralls ended matters. They say that not one Dane reached the river's bank, beyond which their comrades watched and raged, powerless to help them. ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
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