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.

When human statecraft attaches a chain to the feet of a free man, whom it makes a slave in contempt of nature and citizenship, eternal justice rivets the other end about the tyrant's neck.

Civilization is a scar tissue from a past of violence and destruction.

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~

Fashion made a harsh mistress.

"Chains," said the Tinker, coming up behind her. "They bind us, whether we want them to or not. But a heart without chains would have nothing to hold it, might simply blow away."

She sometimes felt she had been cursed, as if by some malevolent goddess in a Greek myth, to lose everyone she ever loved.

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

"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.

[she] felt more at ease than she had at the hotel. The people there reminded her of who she was not. Also, she did not know why, but her mother's necklace had seemed to weigh upon her, like a burden from the past. In doing one more unforgivable thing, she felt that she had divested herself of a last anchor to the respectable life she had left behind. Estela slept well that night for the first time since arriving in Mexico City. (p12)