Characterless Quotes

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She sits before me, sullen but hopeful, characterless, about to dissolve into tears. I squeeze her hand back, moved, no, touched by her ignorance of evil. She has one more test to pass. Do you own a briefcase?” I ask her, swallowing.
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Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho)
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Why not?" she said, "and take note of what I am about to say to you. Never feel secure with the woman you love, for there are more dangers in woman's nature than you imagine. Women are neither as good as their admirers and defenders maintain, nor as bad as their enemies make them out to be. Woman's character is characterlessness. The best woman will momentarily go down into the mire, and the worst unexpectedly rises to deeds of greatness and goodness and puts to shame those that despise her. No woman is so good or so bad, but that at any moment she is capable of the most diabolical as well as of the most divine, of the filthiest as well as of the purest, thoughts, emotions, and actions. In spite of all the advances of civilization, woman has remained as she came out of the hand of nature. She has the nature of a savage, who is faithful or faithless, magnanimous or cruel, according to the impulse that dominates at the moment. Throughout history it has always been a serious deep culture which has produced moral character. Man even when he is selfish or evil always follows principles, woman never follows anything but impulses. Don't ever forget that, and never feel secure with the woman you love.
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Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (Venus In Furs)
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Because it may be fine to die in the open, with one’s body still young and healthy amidst the triumphant echoes of the bugles; but it is a sadder fate to die of wounds in a hospital ward after long sufferings, and it is more melancholy still to meet one’s end in one’s bed at home in the midst of fond laments, dim lights and medicine bottles. But nothing is more difficult than to die in some strange, indifferent spot, in the characterless bed of an inn, to die there old and worn and leave no one behind in the world.
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Dino Buzzati (The Tartar Steppe (Canons Book 90))
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Prophet may you be! If I be false, or swerve a hair from truth, when time is old and hath forgot itself, when waterdrops have worn the stones of Troy, and blind oblivion swallowed cities up, and mighty states characterless are grated to dusty nothing, yet let memory, from false to false, among false maids in love, upbraid my falsehood!
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William Shakespeare (Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare in Production))
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when u have no enemies ,you are characterless.
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Paul Newman
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Force your kids to pursue success and they shall be drowned into the abyss of characterlessness, but let them pursue excellence and they shall rise as glorious Gods.
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Abhijit Naskar (Human Making is Our Mission: A Treatise on Parenting (Humanism Series))
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On the one hand, here is death: stagnant, permanent, immobilized, silent, unvarying, inactive, formless, characterless, shrinking, constrictive, irreversible. On the other hand, here is transition: active, forceful, adaptable, energetic, animated, expansive, full of possibility, capacious, comprehensive, vital, ambitious.
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Daniel Mallory Ortberg (Something That May Shock and Discredit You)
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Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from the Underground)
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It was as if God had decreed this characterless engagement of brainless forces as his answer to the human presumption.
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E.L. Doctorow (The March)
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Criminals, it turns out, are the one social group in America we have permission to hate. In 'colorblind' America, criminals are the new whipping boys. They are entitled to no respect and little moral concern. Like the 'coloreds' in the years following emancipation, criminals today are deemed a characterless and purposeless people, deserving of our collective scorn and contempt. When we say someone was 'treated like a criminal,' what we mean to say is that he or she was treated as less than human, like a shameful creature. Hundreds of years ago, our nation put those considered less than human in shackles; less than one hundred years ago, we relegated them to the other side of town; today we put them in a cage. Once released, they find that a heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon them.
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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He wondered seriously if love wasn't a feeling at all but a simple characterless state of shared isolation. If you were alone with a woman your feelings might change from moment to moment but the circumstance of your shared fate did not change. Maybe that's where the love was, in the combined circumstance.
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E.L. Doctorow (Loon Lake)
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Mental illness is a physical illness, not some disease that enters the minds of the weak or characterless. Like cancer can happen to anyone, let's start treating mental illnesses as what they are, devastating diseases. ~ Sherry Hunter
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Sherry Hunter
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Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature. That is my conviction of forty years.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground)
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Not just wicked, no, I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent man of the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure – primarily a limited being. This is my forty-year-old conviction. I am now
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground)
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Saying that your religion is better than other religions is similar to saying that your mother is great but other mothers are characterless
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Ismat Ahmed Shaikh
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Saying that you religion is better than other religions is similar to saying that your mother is great but other mothers are characterless.
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Ismat Ahmed Shaikh
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Those wildly cheer thee; they will have characterless betray you in the hour of truth.
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Kristian Goldmund Aumann (The Seven Deadly Sins)
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There is no one more sinister or dangerous than an ambitious yet characterless Politician!
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Robert Anthony Kerr
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Those who were disrobing Draupadi also thought that they were doing everything within the rules. They were also taking the moral high ground by labelling her as β€œcharacterless”. You can’t decide who is right or wrong, moral or immoral. Leave it on Karma. And watch out for your Karma because cheering at public punishment of a β€œcriminal” is medieval, animalistic and very bad Karma.
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Shunya
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Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature. That is my conviction of forty years. I am forty years old now, and you know forty years is a whole lifetime; you know it is extreme old age. To live longer than forty years is bad manners, is vulgar, immoral. Who does live beyond forty? Answer that, sincerely and honestly. I will tell you who do: fools and worthless fellows. I tell all old men that to their face, all these venerable old men, all these silver-haired and reverend seniors! I tell the whole world that to its face! I have a right to say so, for I shall go on living to sixty myself. To seventy! To eighty!... Stay, let me take breath...
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead)
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He was full of ironical admiration of his childishness and innocence in letting a wandering and characterless and scandalous American load him up with deceptions of so transparent a character that they ought not to have deceived the housecat. On the other hand, he was remorselessly severe upon me for beguiling him, by studied and discreditable artifice, into bragging and boasting about his poor game in the presence of a professional expert disguised in lies and frauds, who could empty more balls in billiard pockets in an hour than he could empty into a basket in a day.
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Mark Twain (Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2: The Complete and Authoritative Edition (Autobiography of Mark Twain series))
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It is our duty to guide the future of our nation now, don't just say that they are directionless, characterless or any other less people, add your part in this matter, be the character & direction you want to see in them, be the big shining sun for them that they could shine like stars in your light.
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Mohsin Ali Shaukat
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A heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon us. As a people, we feel ourselves to be not only deeply injured, but grossly misunderstood. Our white countrymen do not know us. They are strangers to our character, ignorant of our capacity, oblivious to our history and progress, and are misinformed as to the principles and ideas that control and guide us, as a people. The great mass of American citizens estimates us as being a characterless and purposeless people; and hence we hold up our heads, if at all, against the withering influence of a nation’s scorn and contempt.1 β€”Frederick Douglass, in a statement on behalf of delegates to the National Colored Convention held in Rochester, New York, in July 1853
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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But at once, as happens with so-called characterless people, he desired so passionately to experience again that dissolute life so familiar to him, that he decided to go. And at once the thought occurred to him that the word he had given meant nothing, because before giving his word to Prince Andrei, he had also given Prince Anatole his word that he would be there; finally he thought that all these words of honor were mere conventions, with no definite meaning, especially if you considered that you might die the next day, or something so extraordinary might happen to you that there would no longer be either honor or dishonor. That sort of reasoning often came to Pierre, destroying all his decisions and suppositions
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Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)
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Criminals, it turns out, are the one social group in America we have permission to hate. In β€œcolorblind” America, criminals are the new whipping boys. They are entitled to no respect and little moral concern. Like the β€œcoloreds” in the years following emancipation, criminals today are deemed a characterless and purposeless people, deserving of our collective scorn and contempt. When we say someone was β€œtreated like a criminal,” what we mean to say is that he or she was treated as less than human, like a shameful creature. Hundreds of years ago, our nation put those considered less than human in shackles; less than one hundred years ago, we relegated them to the other side of town; today we put them in cages. Once released, they find that a heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon them. Brave
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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Then, abrupt and decisive, the Emerald City rose before them. A city of insistence, of blanket declaration. It made no sense, clotting up the horizon, sprouting like a mirage on the characterless plains of central Oz. Glinda hated it from the moment she saw it. Brash upstart of a city.
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Gregory Maguire (Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (The Wicked Years, #1))
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your wealth and so called status can not earn real respect for you in the society , if you are characterless (have no purity).
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Tayyab Nawaz Sulehri
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Many of those insects have critical impacts on their ecosystems. They are the Pleistocene megafauna writ small. They chew up and decompose the dead to keep things clean and keep energy circulating through its natural cycle. They riddle the soil with holes to aerate it. They spread seeds. They pollinate a third of the foods Americans eat. They are useful, in other words. But the large majority are also characterless and uglyβ€”not quick to draw our sympathy. And
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Jon Mooallem (Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America)
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It’s a shallow society and adjusting to it leads to a characterless life.
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Abhijit Naskar (Aşkanjali: The Sufi Sermon)
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And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent man of the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure – primarily a limited being.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground)
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heavy and cruel hand has been laid upon us. As a people, we feel ourselves to be not only deeply injured, but grossly misunderstood. Our white countrymen do not know us. They are strangers to our character, ignorant of our capacity, oblivious to our history and progress, and are misinformed as to the principles and ideas that control and guide us, as a people. The great mass of American citizens estimates us as being a characterless and purposeless people; and hence we hold up our heads, if at all, against the withering influence of a nation’s scorn and contempt.1 β€”Frederick Douglass, in a statement on behalf of delegates to the National Colored Convention held in Rochester, New York, in July 1853
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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A rough-hewn, squarish tunnel, maybe eight feet on a side, carved through dark stone, stretched ahead of him curving off to the left. Smokeless flames flickered in sconces spaced along the walls. Okay, first question: Who lit the sconces? And second what were the flames feeding on? What did it matter? In sharp contrast to the blah, semi-modern characterless buildings on the surface, this tunnel looked ancient. And that gave Frankie hope. Because it might lead somewhere else. Was it unreasonable to hope it led back to Manhatten-his Manhatten? Most certainly. Did he have a better route to follow? No. With the manuscript of the Great American Novella clutched to his chest, P.Frank Winslow started walking.
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F.Paul Wilson
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I'd rather die than compromise my character.
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Abhijit Naskar (Vatican Virus: The Forbidden Fiction)
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So long as you are in Russia, you had much better let yourself be quietly robbed than use any violence against the robber. It is less trouble, and it is cheaper in the long run. If you do not, you may unexpectedly find yourself some fine morning in prison! You must know that many of the young justices belong to the new school of morals." "What is that? I have not heard of any new discoveries lately in the sphere of speculative ethics." "Well, to tell you the truth, I am not one of the initiated, and I can only tell you what I hear. So far as I have noticed, the representatives of the new doctrine talk chiefly about Gumannost' and Tchelovetcheskoe dostoinstvo. You know what these words mean?" "Humanity, or rather humanitarianism and human dignity," I replied, not sorry to give a proof that I was advancing in my studies. "There, again, you allow your dictionary and your priest to mislead you. These terms, when used by a Russian, cover much more than we understand by them, and those who use them most frequently have generally a special tenderness for all kinds of malefactors. In the old times, malefactors were popularly believed to be bad, dangerous people; but it has been lately discovered that this is a delusion. A young proprietor who lives not far off assures me that they are the true Protestants, and the most powerful social reformers! They protest practically against those imperfections of social organisation of which they are the involuntary victims. The feeble, characterless man quietly submits to his chains; the bold, generous, strong man breaks his fetters, and helps others to do the same. A very ingenious defence of all kinds of rascality, isn't it?
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Donald Mackenzie Wallace (Russia)
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It struck her as extremely characterless for any human being to sit around waiting for execution. It wasn’t that she had so much character, thought Mrs. Pollifax, but rather that always in her life she had found it difficult to submit. The list of her small rebellions was endless. Surely there was room for one more?
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Dorothy Gilman (The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax (Mrs. Pollifax, #1))
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If you do good only to good people, you are characterless. ( Your character is not of a do gooder.)
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Vineet Raj Kapoor
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By preaching foolish pupils, looking after a wicked woman or keeping company of worried persons, even scholars will suffer. Therefore, foolish persons should never be encouraged to undertake any good deed. One must stay away from a characterless woman, otherwise his image will be tarnished. Similarly, an unhappy person can never give happiness, so stay away from him.
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R.P. Jain (Complete Chanakya Neeti)
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The CV is a particular sub-genre of post-Fordist autobiography, a copy-and-paste cosmetic narrative which accentuates the positives and papers over any cracks; ironically, at a time when continuity in work is at its weakest, one's life history must be made to seem as smooth and characterless as a shampoo advertisement. This again is a form of emotional labour, a micromanagement of feeling. Can I force myself into a state of enthusiasm as I string together various unwanted and unfulfilling jobs and inflate their personal significance, while reducing my identity to a series of bullet points? If I can, then once again, this is a triumph of style over substance.
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Ivor Southwood (Non Stop Inertia)
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Like all modern courthouses, this one is a characterless fortress, testament to paper pushing, bureaucracy, and the incipient insanity of our system. Going postal is no longer reserved for those who pledge that β€œNeither rain nor snow nor gloom of night would deter its couriers from their appointed rounds.” It’s become a kind of rite of passage: disgruntled employee returns and shoots boss, disgruntled wife kills kids, disgruntled husband wrecks car, kills strangers, and then kills wife. Hard not to be surprised, when the bulk of public conversation goes like this: β€œPaper or plastic?” The loss of the human touch scares me.
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A.M. Homes (May We Be Forgiven)
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Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an in- telligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the nine- teenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky
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It is our duty to guide the future of our nation now, don't just say that they are directionless, characterless or any other less, add your part in this matter, be the character & direction you want to see in them, be the big shining sun for them that they could shin like a star in your light.
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Mohsin Ali Shaukat
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Every novelist of serious pretensions adopts an ironic attitude towards his upper-class characters. Indeed when a novelist has to put a definitely upper-class person--a duke or a baronet or whatnot--into one of his stories he guys him more or less instinctively. There is an important subsidiary cause of this in the poverty of the modern upper-class dialect. The speech of 'educated' people is now so lifeless and characterless that a novelist can do nothing with it. By far the easiest way of making it amusing is to burlesque it, which means pretending that every upper-class person is an ineffectual ass. The trick is imitated from novelist to novelist, and in the end becomes almost a reflex action.
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George Orwell (The Road to Wigan Pier)
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Never feel secure with the woman you love, for there are more dangers in woman's nature than you imagine. Women are neither as good as their admirers and defenders maintain, nor as bad as their enemies make them out to be. Woman's character is characterlessness.
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Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (Venus in Furs)