Jay Asher Quotes

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

I am tired of trying to hold things together that cannot be held. Trying to control what cannot be controlled. I am tired of denying myself what I want for fear of breaking things I cannot fix. They will break no matter what we do.

While one might laugh at the meaningless boredom of people a decade or two ago, the emptiness has for many now moved from the state of boredom to a state of futility and despair, which holds promise of dangers.

I've stopped many things such as healthy eating. What's the point? In this post-truth era, I feel increasingly powerless.

It makes you not believe in anything, when you do every single thing you can do right, and then there's still some way to mess it up.

You realize there are things you can't control. You can't control a lot of the stuff that happens in your life.

You were supposed to have hope, right? You were supposed to respect its power and hold on. And so I did. I held, and held, and let hope fill me. But as the days went on, it seemed I could be holding for a long, long time. Hope could be the most powerful thing or the most useless

It’s all about control. Control is illusory. No matter what university you go to, no matter what degree you hold, if your goal is to become master of your own destiny, you have more to learn. Parkinson’s is a perfect metaphor for lack of control. Every unwanted movement in my hand or arm, every twitch that I cannot anticipate or arrest, is a reminder that even in the domain of my own being, I am not calling the shots. I tried to exert control by drinking myself to a place of indifference, which just exacerbated the sense of miserable hopelessness.

You can have your wishes, your plans, but at the end of the day, it's out of your control -Mia

Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, roll darkly down the torrent of his fate.

She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.

What's the use coming home to get the blues over what can't be helped.

But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here’s the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.

I really did not feel okay about any of this, and there was really nothing I could do about any of it.

When you're living your life in endurance mode, you don't expect anything good to happen. I'm not saying that you don't dream about some miracle that would change everything for the better. But you pretty much know it's only a fantasy, and that you have no real control over anything.

It's a losers' game to try and guess, it really is.

I am tired of trying to hold things together that cannot be held.

I think people feel like there are all these things in our lives that we don't really have control over.

I think that fear comes about when there's things in the world that we want to change, things we're scared or angry about, and we can't change them, and so we become fearful; we develop anxiety.

Risk is trying to control something you are powerless over.

I'm familiar with that feeling of silence that comes with a very imminent catastrophe, when you know you have absolutely no control over a situation.

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

You can't control everything that comes to you.

It's a lot like life. I think 99 percent of what goes on in life, we have very little control over.

Not only do I not know what's going on, I wouldn't know what to do about it if I did.