“Maybe all critique itself can do is allow you to sketch the bars of your own prison.”

“You are in a prison with no bars. I worry about you.”

“We're all our own prisons, we are each all our own wardens and we do our own time. I can't judge anyone else. What other people do is not really my affair unless they approach me with it. Prison's in your mind. Can't you see I'm free?”

“Never allow your comfort zone to become your secret prison.”

“I didn't put you in a prison, Evey. I just showed you the bars.”

“The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism, is to do more of it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique, feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The only way forward is through, which means further in.”

“I touch your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger, I am drawing it as if it were something my hand was sketching, as if for the first time your mouth opened a little, and all I have to do is close my eyes to erase it and start all over again, every time I can make the mouth I want appear, the mouth which my hand chooses and sketches on your face, and which by some chance that I do not seek to understand coincides exactly with your mouth which smiles beneath the one my hand is sketching on you.”

“If you desire a man to tell you comfortable lies about your prowess, and so fetter any hope of true excellence, I'm sure you may find one anywhere. Not all prisons are made of iron bars. Some are made of feather beds.”

“Anybody can be a bum; all it takes is the right girl, the right bar and the right friends, and you are well… your buddies will see you off. They'll christen your dumpster for you.”

“Cool,” I said. “You can IM with the Council from campus. Maybe you can command people to do your homework.”