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1 " I do not take commands from someone with no character or appreciative mindset. "
― Mohith Agadi
2 " You silly Arthur! If you knew anything about...anything, which you don't, you would know that I adore you. Everyone in London knows it except you. It is a public scandal the way I adore you. I have been going about for the last six months telling the whole of society that I adore you. I wonder you consent to have anything to say to me. I have no character left at all. At least, I feel so happy that I am quite sure I have no character left at all. "
― Oscar Wilde , An Ideal Husband
3 " Workshop Hermeticism, fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre- and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical description; no image undissolved into regulation Updikean metaphor; no overture without a dramatized scene to 'show' what's 'told'; no denouement prior to an epiphany whose approach can be charted by and Freitag on any Macintosh. "
― David Foster Wallace , Both Flesh and Not: Essays
4 " Literary works are not democracies. We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. We may, but the country of Novels, Etc., doesn't. In that faraway place, no character is created equal. One or two of them get all the breaks; the rest exist to get them to the finish line. "
― Thomas C. Foster , How to Read Literature Like a Professor
5 " It is a mere cowardice to seek safety in negations. No character becomes strong in that way. You will be thrown into the world some day and then every rational satisfaction your nature that you deny now will assault like a savage appetite. "
― George Eliot , The Mill on the Floss
6 " As the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, — as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen — and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. "
7 " In life,” he said, “there are no essentially major or minor characters. To that extent, all fiction and biography, and most historiography, are a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius’s point of view and called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didn’t think he was a minor character in anything, I daresay. Or suppose you’re an usher in a wedding. From the groom’s viewpoint he’s the major character; the others play supporting parts, even the bride. From your viewpoint, though, the wedding is a minor episode in the very interesting history of your life, and the bridge and groom both are minor figures. What you’ve done is choose to play the part of a minor character: it can be pleasant for you to pretend to be less important you know you are, as Odysseus does when he disguises as a swineherd. And every member of the congregation at the wedding sees himself as the major character, condescending to witness the spectacle. So in this sense fiction isn’t a lie at all, but a true representation of the distortion that everyone makes of life. “Now, not only are we the heroes of our own life stories–we’re the ones who conceive the story, and give other people the essences of minor characters. But since no man’s life story as a rule is ever one story with a coherent plot, we’re always reconceiving just the sort of hero we are, and consequently just the sort of minor roles that other people are supposed to play. This is generally true. If any man displays almost the same character day in and day out, all day long, it’s either because he has no imagination, like an actor who can play only one role, or because he has an imagination so comprehensive that he sees each particular situation of his life as an episode in some grand over-all plot, and can so distort the situations that the same type of hero can deal with them all. But this is most unusual. “This kind of role-assigning is myth-making, and when it’s done consciously or unconsciously for the purpose of aggrandizing or protecting your ego–and it’s probably done for this purpose all the time–it becomes Mythotherapy. Here’s the point: an immobility such as you experienced that time in Penn Station is possible only to a person who for some reason or other has ceased to participate in Mythotherapy. At that time on the bench you were neither a major nor a minor character: you were no character at all. It’s because this has happened once that it’s necessary for me to explain to you something that comes quite naturally to everyone else. It’s like teaching a paralytic how to walk again. "
― John Barth
8 " One of the things that Dostoevsky talks about is that no character is too high to fall and no character is too low to be redeemed. 'Crime and Punishment' began with a person going out and consciously becoming a cold-blooded murderer, and it took 800 pages and an epilogue before the person finally asked for forgiveness. "