“I'm a super hero, too, underneath my sweater.”

“Theology starts with a crisis, the very crisis of reality itself. The crisis is the fact that you live, that you have a life to live. … The crisis is the very mystery of our existence and the yearning for there to be some kind of meaning to it.”

“Because cultural difference has long been conceived as a redemptive solution to the ambivalence of a Western culture established in the destruction of its own traditions, the appropriation of other aesthetic and spiritual modes is ultimately self-referential. This means that any attempt to perceive another culture based on the commodification and consumption of difference will fail. Understanding never really was the point.”

“Our conceptual maps tend to lack a way to conceive the immanence of violence and power in the ideals and practices that have become dominant in the Western tradition. Mass death has tended to be conceived as something accidental, something outside the ordinary run of events. I think the difficulty in coming to terms with the peculiarities of the Western will to power has to do with the absence of a central metaphor capable of describing the link between consumption and death. The consumptive mentality has in many respects been normalized, as has the violence that underpins and is the effect of systems of universal judgment. Certainly the aestheticization of difference is coextensive with the romance with violence that has become so characteristic of contemporary Western society.”

“About half the practice of a decent lawyer is telling would-be clients that they are damned fools and should shut up. ”

“Rose, I'm an addict with no work ethic who is likely going to go insane. I'm not like you. I'm not a super-hero.""Not yet," I said.”

“Forget trying to be Supermom - it's way too stressful and who needs more stress? Besides super heroes tend to wear a lot of clingy Lycra and none of us needs that.”