Rumer Godden Quotes

I think that is the ultimate cowardice, when someone makes your choices for you in an institutional way. And you just say, "Well, I have no other option."

The actor is in the hands of a lot of other people, over which he has no control.

What they're doing is, they're making the decisions for us. That's what this country is coming down to. They're going to make the decisions for us.

I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.

They kind of took it out of our hands. We're still able to deal with him on an emotional level.

I mean, being a child was being a child, was being a creature without power, without pocket money, without escape routes of any kind. So I didn't want to be a child.

It's weird to have no control over something that you're involved in.

Being oppressed means the absence of choices

Being in the military just lets you know how helpless you are. You could train forever but you're still at the mercy of someone in the Pentagon, or somebody in the rear moving you around like a chess piece.

We're like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk.

...the plan will happen in spite of us, not because of us.

You can get into a place in your life where you no longer are in control of events, and events are in control of you.

The only thing that isn't free is you. You do as you're told. You sit in your seat until they say 'Stand'. You stay put til they say 'Go'. Maybe that's the way you like it. It's easy. It's all there. You don't have to think about. You don't even have to feel it.

They who see through the eyes of others are controlled by the will of others.

A man or a woman is said to be absorbed when the water has total control of him, and he no control of the water. A swimmer moves around willfully. An absorbed being has no will but the water's going. Any word or act is not really personal, but the way the water has of speaking or doing. As when you hear a voice coming out of a wall, and you know that it's not the wall talking, but someone inside, or perhaps someone outside echoing off the wall. Saints are like that. They've achieved the condition of a wall, or a door.

Because the world to-day is so constructed that no one can do what he would like to do, and he is forced, instead, to do what others wish him to do. Because the question of money always intrudes—into what we do, into what we are, into what we wish to become, into our work, into our highest aspirations, even into our relations with the people we love!

Fate is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.

When I was a teenager, I didn't get to do a lot of the things that other kids my age were doing because my dad was very controlling and he wouldn't allow me to go to school activities, like games and dances. So I didn't have positive expectations for my future or really dream about what I could do with my life. I was just trying to survive until I could get out on my own.

Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.

To be at other people's orders brings out all the bad in me.

Poverty is not just a material problem. Poverty is something wider: it is about powerlessness, about being deprived of basic opportunities and freedom of choice.

If people believe they can be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they have no control over outside circumstances, those thoughts of fear, separation, and powerlessness, if persistent, can attract them to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I am afraid we are little better than straws upon the water; we may flatter ourselves that we swim, when the current carries us along.

As long as you think that the cause of your problem is "out there" - as long as you think that anyone or anything is responsible for your suffering - the situation is hopeless. It means that you are forever in the role of victim, that you’re suffering in paradise.

The thing that I did not like about being signed to a label was I unable to have control over what I wanted to do.