He... was attached by ties stronger than reason could break — chains, forged by habit, which it would be cruel to attempt to loosen.

She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.

The fixity of the cosmic sequences
Fastened with hidden inevitable links
She must disrupt, dislodge by her soul’s force
Her past, a block on the immortal’s road,
Make a rased ground and shape anew her fate.

01.02_003:011

These five links stand out in the chain that binds our will. They hold us, guide us, coerce us — And we rattle them still. ~The Bern Seer~

"You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell me why?"
"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it."

The fate of the entire human race was now tied to these slender fingers. Without hesitation, Ye pressed the button.

The curse of every ancient civilization was that its men in the end became unable to fight. Materialism, luxury, safety, even sometimes an almost modern sentimentality, weakened the fibre of each civilized race in turn; each became in the end a nation of pacifists, and then each was trodden under foot by some ruder people that had kept that virile fighting power the lack of which makes all other virtues useless and sometimes even harmful.

Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by such slight ligaments are we bound to prosperity or ruin.

She had a warrior's heart, but the gods in their blind malice had given her the feeble body of a woman.

We were both victims to the same overshadowing evil — she, as mistress, I, as slave.

She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.

Thanks to our cinctures and corsets we have succeeded in making an artificial being out of woman. She is an anomaly, and Nature herself, obedient to the laws of heredity, aids us in complicating and enervating her. We carefully keep her in a state of nervous weakness and muscular inferiority, and in guarding her from fatigue, we take away from her possibilities of development. Thus modeled on a bizarre ideal of slenderness to which, strangely enough, we continue to adhere, our women have nothing in common with us, and this, perhaps, may not be without grave moral and social disadvantages.

She was thoroughly entrenched in her wounds, so much so that she had converted her wounds into a type of social currency

It seemed Eve’s bite from the apple of knowledge was a debt women were doomed to pay for eternity.