James Badge Dale credited as playing...
James Lasombra
- Arthur Parsons: The empty man is a meditation. A focal point for the targeted manifestation of hidden energies.
- James Lasombra: Right, and already you're starting to lose me.
- Arthur Parsons: Just as man feeds and is fed by the biosphere, the atmosphere, so it is our thoughts feed and are fed by the noosphere... the sum of all conscious thought, transmission from which can be stimulated through the application of certain vectors, very much like a virus. You can't see it.
- James Lasombra: Well, what is... It?
- Arthur Parsons: The veil between form and flesh and the means by which it can be pierced and the two allowed to commingle. We're each of us blind in our way. Distractions rob us of focus. Technology robs us of memory. Repetition robs us of comprehension. You know the child's game: if you say your names enough times it becomes gibberish. That holds true for whole concepts, even entire bodies of thought. For example, take Nietzsche's old line: if you stare into an abyss, it also states into you. Right? Well, that has been rendered meaningless through repetition. It's a refrigerator magnet, it's a cliche. It's harmless. But when was the last time you really thought about that? What is an abyss, and if you stare into it, why? What about it calls to you? If it stares into you, it stands to reason something in you must also be calling to it. And that, my friend, is anything but harmless, if you really reflect on it. So the question becomes: if profound meaning can be robbed of something by so simple a task as repetition, which is more fundamental, which is more true - your name, or the gibberish. That... is the empty man.
- James Lasombra: [Interrupts Pontifex Receptionist] Oh, yeah. No, no, I get all that. I grew up in San Francisco.
- [after watching and escaping cult practices]
- James Lasombra: What the fuck was that? What the fuck was that?
- James Lasombra: [maces Garrett] Hey, Neal Cassidy.
- James Lasombra: Do you have a suspect?
- Detective Villiers: By all appearances, it was a suicide.
- James Lasombra: People don't... People just don't do that to themselves.
- Detective Villiers: My point exactly. You know this town. One, two murders a year. Three if were frisky. Now this? It's communicable. It changes people. Three weeks ago, a mother fed her newborn infant to a pack of stray dogs. She said the baby had been whispering to her. In the kitchen, she wrote "The Empty Man" on the linoleum floor. I've come to the conclusion that there is no solving crimes like these. Sure, we can put that mother in prison, we can even put her in the gas chamber. But that's not solving it. It's inexplicable. It's too big, it's... we can't indict the cosmos.
- James Lasombra: You're not telling me anything.
- Garrett: I am telling you. You're just not listening.