“So we have giant super-smart vipers who slithered in here, killed our people, opened the vault, stole something from it, and slithered out, undetected?”“Appears so.”“Okay. Just wanted to make sure it wasn’t something dangerous.”

“...There are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never "plain," nor appearances ever "sincere." To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it. No image is presumed inviolable in our dance hall of visual politics, and all images are potentially powerful.”

“A brick has no legs, so it probably slithers like a snake. Therefore, a brick might make a good pet. And at least you wouldn’t have to walk it.
”

“In a sense, all life is a prank. We are not who we appear to be and no one else is as they appear to be. So how can we handle that little mystery? This whole business about God – what’s that all about? No one knows anything about that either. So we have people who are not as they appear to be, telling us about something that they have no idea about. We really are on our own here to try and figure it out. That’s the real adventure of it. Some people are anxious to tell you what they know and have experienced. I’d rather hear from some people who admit to what they don’t know and haven’t experienced. They’re much more interesting.”

“Oh, he’ll try, I’m sure. . . . The usual empty words, the usual slithering out of action . . . oh, on the Dark Lord’s orders, of course!”

“I want to make the world into something better so that he can be okay.”