“Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not.”

“I've been in love with you for weeks.'There's no such thing,' she says. 'It's a rhetorical device. It's a bourgeois fallacy.'Haven't you ever been in love, then?'When I was younger,' she says, 'I allowed myself to be constructed by the discourse of romantic love for a while, yes.'What the hell does that mean?'We aren't essences, Vic. We aren't unique individual essences existing prior to language. There is only language.”

“but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from rhetoric.”

“Bondage is of the mind; freedom too is of the mind. If you say 'I am a free soul. I am a son of God who can bind me' free you shall be.”

“You say: I am not free. But I have raised and lowered my arm. Everyone understands that this illogical answer is an irrefutable proof of freedom.”

“Freedom is anxiety's petri dish. If routine blunts anxiety, freedom incubates it. Freedom says, "Even if you don't want to make choices, you have to, and you can never be sure you have chosen correctly." Freedom says, "Even not to choose is to choose." Freedom says, "So long as you are aware of your freedom, you are going to experience the discomfort that freedom brings." Freedom says, "You're on your own. Deal with it.”