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That’s how you all are: keep company with dishonorable women, or with honorable women— there’s only one choice!

Maybe is there a way to write it without all these(colon and dash)? I can gather that the part after the colon is is opposite to how they so-called all are.

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    Dialog is often ungrammatical, or follows esoteric rules particular to the people or culture in which it takes place. This applies to real dialog in the real world, and also to dialog in books. The examples you have given appear to be part of a diatribe directed at a group. The person speaking may be attributing sentiments to the group as a form of critique. I wonder if including much more context might help people understand the sentences?
    – mkeith
    Commented Sep 18, 2022 at 2:07
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    For the first it may mean the speaker will “be” a streetwalker because of wanting to carouse.
    – Peter
    Commented Sep 18, 2022 at 2:08
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    I think if we were using text messages to chat in real time we could be ungrammatical. I believe communication via email or here in the comment section of a forum would be held to a higher standard. This is just my opinion, though. Not a defensible rule. Dialog spoken between two people in person is often ungrammatical, and since that is the norm, in novels, such dialog is also often ungrammatical, mimicking the way people actually speak.
    – mkeith
    Commented Sep 18, 2022 at 3:37
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    Welcome to ELL. On this site, we only ask one question at a time. Also, if you're asking about the meaning of a whole sentence, we ask that you be very clear what specific parts of the sentence you're unsure about so we can focus just on those. I can think of several reasons an English learner might not understand the second and third sentences, but I don't know which ones apply to you.
    – gotube
    Commented Sep 18, 2022 at 4:05
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    If you mean The Idiot by Dostoevsky, you should give that information in your question (and note that it must be a translation from the Russian, perhaps made some decades ago). Commented Sep 18, 2022 at 7:24

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