Bentley Little Quotes

Enjoy that?" Tanith said with a little grin. Valkyrie grinned back, her eyes bright. "I keep telling Skulduggery he should get a bike." "What does he say?" "He says people who wear leathers, like you, should ride motorbikes. People who wear exquisite suits, like him, should drive Bentleys.

It's my hurt, my pain, and who are you to take it from me? I don't need rescuing, I don't need pity, I don't need opinions, I need fucking--and maybe a little spanking for indulging my anger.

A light wind blew through here that carried with it scents of sadness and loss, not recognizable odors but smells that corresponded to nothing, chimerical fragrances able to evoke melancholic memories.

Her last call, at midnight, had been the worst. "I'll pull your cock out of your asshole," she'd said, and for some reason her voice at that moment had reminded him of his mother's.

Maybe these simple, little, ordinary things are the big things I’m meant to accomplish with my life.

Julian tried to keep a pleasant smile on his face, though already it felt strained. He was uncomfortable with people who used the word blessed as a part of their everyday speech. The implication was that God was intervening in the minutiae of their lives, hanging around and helping them with their jobs or children or household chores as though He had nothing better to do. Maybe it was true, Julian thought wryly. Maybe that was why there were wars and murders and earthquakes and hurricanes. God was too busy helping real estate agents find new listings to deal with those other issues.

It was one of those days when it’s a minute away from snowing, and there’s this electricity in the air, you can almost hear it. And this bag was just, dancing with me, like a little kid beggin’ me to play with it – for fifteen minutes. And that’s the day I realized that there was this entire life behind things, and this incredibly benevolent force that wanted me to know that there was no reason to be afraid, ever. Video’s a poor excuse, I know. But it helps me remember – I need to remember. Sometimes, there’s so much beauty in the world – I feel like I can’t take it, like my heart is just going to cave in. — Wes Bentley [Ricky Fitts] American Beauty (1999) Written by Alan Ball. Directed by Sam Mendes.

remember: not all that is fiction is fictional, and not all that is true is transparent.

This can't be constitutional," he said. "This is America, damn it. We still have freedom of speech here.

No one said a word; it was as if they were waiting for me to retract my question. Jan's hand found mine and held it. "What the hell is this? A wake?" My grandpa came out of the house carrying a tray of buns.

It seems like maybe we tried to sleep normally a long time ago, when Bentley was a puppy. But then he gradually moved from his little bed to the floor next to our bed. And then from the floor to the foot of the bed. And then from the foot to next to me. And now from next to me to between us, under the covers, with his head on a pillow next to ours.

Materialism is a conviction based not upon evidence or logic but upon what Carl Sagan (speaking of another kind of faith) called a “deep-seated need to believe.” Considered purely as a rational philosophy, it has little to recommend it; but as an emotional sedative, what Czeslaw Milosz liked to call the opiate of unbelief, it offers a refuge from so many elaborate perplexities, so many arduous spiritual exertions, so many trying intellectual and moral problems, so many exhausting expressions of hope or fear, charity or remorse. In this sense, it should be classified as one of those religions of consolation whose purpose is not to engage the mind or will with the mysteries of being but merely to provide a palliative for existential grievances and private disappointments. Popular atheism is not a philosophy but a therapy.

Everyone today is so fragmented. This isn’t a country anymore. It’s a collection of tribes, all competing with each other for jobs, money, media attention. When I was young, we were all Americans. Back then, we did what we had to, or what we could, to make this a better nation. We did what was right, what was moral.

This profession offers very little in terms of guarantees—we run toward the sound of gunfire knowing that each and every mission might be our last. But this we hold to as our holy writ—if you go into harm’s way, you will not be forgotten. We will expend every ounce of blood and sweat, down to the last full measure, to bring you home.

Love’s a living thing that has to be fed for it to grow, it has to be pushed around a little to make it stronger, and in the end, because of these things, it will triumph.

They lived in a Wikipedia world, where knowledge was no longer required and only the ability to access it mattered.

anyone in horror’s path is irrevocably altered.

The Night Managers.

and the last shot of the report was of King getting into a chauffeur-driven limousine in front of the black tower.

Newman King was a fictional figurehead, a made-up character.

He was dropped off directly in front of the Black Tower.

And he could not help being a little bit cheered up and consoled as he got into the Bentley and set off alone for Oxford.

There's nothing scarier than groupthink.

A hush fell over the room as the man in black stepped up to the podium.

If they were both mute, they could have a happy life.

History wasn’t a straight line, it was a circle.

Whistling past the graveyard.

No one hated him more than his fans.

He could wait, because hatred is patient.

The current fashion in belligerent atheism usually involves flinging condemnation around with a kind of gallant extravagance, more or less in the direction of all faiths at once, with little interest in precise aim.

My father saw him one time. We live in mexico, on the farm, and Father went to feed the horses. At night. Little man was standing there giving hay to the horses. And Father watch and he came and he told Mother, 'Jedushka Di Muvedushka feeding the horses'. He don't get scared, nothing. In the morning we go look, the horses' hair all braided. So Beautiful! All their hair braided.

A straw man can be a very convenient property, after all. I can see why a plenteously contented, drowsily complacent, temperamentally incurious atheist might find it comforting—even a little luxurious—to imagine that belief in God is no more than belief in some magical invisible friend who lives beyond the clouds, or in some ghostly cosmic mechanic invoked to explain gaps in current scientific knowledge.

Now what have I to read? Some Homer: one Greek play: some Plato: Zimmern: Sheppard, as textbook: Bentley’s Life: if done thoroughly, this will be enough. But which Greek play? and how much Homer, and what Plato? Then there’s the Anthology. All to end upon the Odyssey because of the Elizabethans. And I must read a little Ibsen to compare with Euripides—Racine with Sophocles—perhaps Marlowe with Aeschylus. Sounds very learned; but really might amuse me; and if it doesn’t, no need to go on.

So the rest of the summer you could see the two little girls and Tom like wrens on a wire, on Mrs. Bentley’s front porch, waiting. And when the silvery chimes of the icicle man were heard, the front door opened, Mrs. Bentley floated out with her hand deep down the gullet of her silver-mouthed purse, and for half an hour you could see them there on the porch, the children and the old lady putting coldness into warmness, eating chocolate icicles, laughing. At last they were good friends. “How old are you, Mrs. Bentley?” “Seventy-two.” “How old were you fifty years ago?” “Seventy-two.” “You weren’t ever young, were you, and never wore ribbons or dresses like these?” “No.” “Have you got a first name?” “My name is Mrs. Bentley.” “And you’ve always lived in this one house?” “Always.” “And never were pretty?” “Never.” “Never in a million trillion years?” The two girls would bend toward the old lady, and wait in the pressed silence of four o’clock on a summer afternoon. “Never,” said Mrs. Bentley, “in a million trillion years.

In a successful relationship both partners should be able to uplift, inspire and energize each other. In an Asperger marriage this energy exchange doesn’t seem to take place. Usually the ‘neurotypical’ hands out energy but receives none in return, and thus feels permanently exhausted. Due to the high stress and anxiety levels, the AS partner finds it difficult to sustain his energy and therefore has little left to share. Whatever exists he retains to satisfy any personal requirements. It’s a kind of self-preservation technique. In addition to this, communication problems aggravate the situation by creating an invisible barrier which prevents energy flow.

Providence then - and this is what is most important to grasp - is not the same thing as a universal teleology. To believe in divine and unfailing providence is not to burden one's conscience with the need to see every event in this world not only as an occasion for God's grace, but as a positive determination of God's will whereby he brings to pass a comprehensive design that, in the absence of any single one of these events, would not have been possible. It may seem that this is to draw only the finest of logical distinction, one so fine indeed as to amount to little more than a sophistry. Some theologians - Calvin, for instance - have denied that the distinction between what God wills and what he permits has any meaning at all. And certainly there is no unanimity in the history of Christian exegesis on this matter. Certain classic Western interpretations of Paul's treatment of the hardening of Pharaoh's heart and of the hardened heart of Israel in Romans 9 have taken it as a clear statement of God's immediate determination of his creatures' wills. But in the Eastern Christian tradition, and in the thought of many of the greatest Western theologians, the same argument has often been understood to assert no more than that God in either case allowed a prior corruption of the will to run its course, or even - like a mire in the light of the sun - to harden the outpouring of God's fiery mercy, and always for the sake of a greater good that will perhaps redound even to the benefit of the sinner. One might read Christ's answer to his disciples' question regarding why a man had been born blind - 'that the works of God should be made manifest in him' (John 9:3) - either as a refutation or as a confirmation of the distinction between divine will and permission. When all is said and done, however, not only is the distinction neither illogical nor slight; it is an absolute necessity if - setting aside, as we should, all other judgments as superstitious, stochastic, and secondary - we are to be guided by the full character of what is revealed of God in Christ. For, after all, if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God.

Who, after all, is saying something more objectively atrocious, or more aggressively perverse? The person who claims that every newborn infant enters the world justly under the threat of eternal dereliction, and that a good God imposes or permits the imposition of a state of eternal agony on finite, created rational beings as part of the mystery of his love or sovereignty or justice? Or the person who observes that such ideas are cruel and barbarous and depraved? Which of these two should really be, if not ashamed of his or her words, at least hesitant, ambivalent, and even a little penitent in uttering them? And which has a better right to moral indignation at what the other has said? And, really, don’t these questions answer themselves? A belief does not merit unconditional reverence just because it is old, nor should it be immune to being challenged in terms commensurate to the scandal it seems to pose. And the belief that a God of infinite intellect, justice, love, and power would condemn rational beings to a state of perpetual torment, or would allow them to condemn themselves on account of their own delusion, pain, and anger, is probably worse than merely scandalous. It may be the single most horrid notion the religious imagination has ever conceived, and the most irrational and spiritually corrosive picture of existence possible. And anyone who thinks that such claims are too strong or caustic, while at the same time finding the traditional notion of a hell of everlasting suffering perfectly unobjectionable, needs to consider whether he or she is really thinking clearly about the matter at all. (from Public Orthodoxy, “In Defense of a Certain Tone of Voice”)

I’m going to find out who Amber is. We’ve got to get to her before he does.” My head swirled with maybes. Maybe Tony would lose his nerve. Maybe he’d drag his heels just a little longer. Maybe he’d show his hand too soon, and Amber would fight him off or get away from him in time. There was still a chance. I love social media and the people who are careless with it. Tony had an open Facebook profile. I rummaged through his pictures and posts, looking for a clue. Then I found one, and wished I hadn’t. “Bentley.” “Did you find her?” he asked, peering over his bifocals. “Amber’s his daughter, Bentley. She’s eight years old.

The cool breeze that ruffled her hair felt like something more than wind. 

New Year’s has never been a real holiday to me anyway. There’s no gifts, no feast, just…bad TV.

his shoulders slumped as though he were a human-shaped balloon that had just lost half of its air.

On the Today show, there was a story about a new poll that had been conducted regarding religious beliefs. A majority of Americans reported that they believed in angels, and a significant number thought they were personally protected by a guardian angel.  He changed the channel to CNN, where they were covering a shooting at a North Carolina high school, a subject more comfortingly normal. 

More than once she’d felt as though they were talking at each other rather than to each other.

while there has been a great deal of public debate about belief in God in recent years (much of it a little petulant, much of it positively ferocious), the concept of God around which the arguments have run their seemingly interminable courses has remained strangely obscure the whole time. The more scrutiny one accords these debates, moreover, the more evident it becomes that often the contending parties are not even talking about the same thing; and I would go as far as to say that on most occasions none of them is talking about God in any coherent sense at all. It is not obvious to me, therefore, that their differences really amount to a meaningful disagreement, as one cannot really have a disagreement without some prior agreement as to what the basic issue of contention is.

If you ask me, people are unnecessarily gloomy about the end of the world.

The dead don’t think of the living,” Ethan said. “That part of their life is over.

her only comfort was to curse each searing day with a creative lexicon she didn’t know she possessed.

A dreamcatcher is supposed to catch the bad dreams, to let the good ones through. When I was a child on the reserve, I had one hanging above my bed. I remember staring at it as I listened to my mother cry for hours in the dark. I have never known one to work.

his father’s punishments were driven by disappointment, partly in the boy, mostly in himself.

He seemed born to find flaws in everything, a task at which he excelled and in which he seemed to delight.

Are you selling something?” “Only happiness.

After the first draft, I sat back and thought to myself, “where did that come from?” That thought was quickly followed by “what is wrong with you?

People with daddy issues can always spot a fellow traveler.

maybe the best thing about The Beatles is that they give you a little bit of light.

maybe the greatest thing about The Beatles is that they give you a little bit of light.

It is the journalist’s responsibility to be objective. When you start printing only one side of a story, when you start limiting people’s access to facts, telling them by your presentation and emphasis what to believe, what is truth, then you are not doing your job.

I’m just funnin’ with you.” The slang term sounded sarcastic and condescending coming from his mouth, particularly with the intentionally dropped g.

Much worse than yours.

some small stuff like Gordon’s cat.

There are four layers of scripture. The first is the surface: the plain meaning of the text. The second goes a little deeper: you see a hint that there is something more to the text. The third level is the level into which you must inquire. You must research to grasp the deeper meaning. And the fourth level contains the deepest of the deep secrets within the text—and all these levels are interconnected; they are alive!

Without banks, you would be burying your money in coffee cans in the back yard

he spied a string of red balloons trailing upward into the sky above the pine and cottonwood trees that shielded the old business district from the newer retailers on the highway.

in the background, behind everything he did or said or thought, like a low hum, was an unyielding sadness, an emotional blackness that threatened to bloom into depression should he pause to examine it.

saturnalia.

People talking on handless devices always remind me of mental patients talking to themselves.

I’m just saying—” “You’re talking about Black Friday.” He nodded. “They’re supposed to be our friends,” Aviva said. “But are they? Really?

The hose of the pool cleaner had snaked out of the water and was touching his shoe.

Seconds later, they were in the midst of a full-fledged rock fight,

One piece had been titled “Expectant Silence” and consisted of a man sitting at the piano, playing nothing.

Samantha. Juniper, Arizona.

That’s 217,” she said curtly.

The Shining.

It was the same strange capering jig he’d performed Thursday night, and once again it was for the benefit of her and her alone.

It was not that he was ashamed of his job or anything, it was just that . . . well, he was ashamed of his job.

That was one thing he’d learned the past two weeks: how much he was affected by the mail, how much the mail intruded on all aspects of his life.

Me? I’m too boring to have nightmares.” He laughed. “Hell, I don’t think I even dream.

It is a haunted place, strange with secrets.

That was a strange way of looking at it, to see a funeral as a popularity contest in which final judgment was passed on a man’s life by the number of people who attended, by the size of the crowd. But it was also strangely appropriate since many people did judge the worth of others by the quantity of their social relationships.

His age was not something of which he’d been unaware—each birthday had been a ritualized reminder of his loss of youth, each New Year’s Eve a prompter of the passing of time—but he now understood emotionally what before he had comprehended only as an intellectual concept.

Mail, by its very nature, was neither all good nor all bad. It carried indifferently messages both positive and negative, filtering nothing, making no distinctions.

didn’t come up with it. It’s a Swedish system.” “But they can’t…” “Can’t what?” “I mean, in Sweden. They don’t kill people to make boards.” “Of course they do. Why do you think those Scandinavian countries are so clean?

They’re like little obnoxious machines of chattering anarchy.

Part of her was afraid to open the report, fearing some sort of Jack Torrance manuscript: the same phrase repeated over and over again, single-spaced, double-sided.

Claire shook her head as she read the e-mails. She had learned to read and write before the advent of the online age and still felt out of place in the e e cummings world of the Internet, where nothing was capitalized, periods were known as dots, and the normal rules of grammar and punctuation did not apply.

1432 East Lincoln Avenue

He’d grown conspiracy minded lately, and the old bumpersticker joke popped into his mind: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

A one-thirty-one slash two B.

Eight Six Five Zero Zero One.

341579

was in room 212 instead of room 215.

1443 Sherwood #7.

John F. Kennedy was assassinated on the date of my birth. My initials are J.F.K.

The kind of man I would take on as a client.

He recognized the cat as Mrs. Miller’s pet Jake.

Inside the sealed worlds of individual cars, it was anything goes.

she should have known that her family would just chug it down, oblivious to not only the authenticity of its taste but the amount of work that went into it. She might as well have bought a gallon of the most Americanized crap available at Costco and poured it into the bowl.

We’re the ones who believe in you,” he said.

There were so many ways a person could die.

Gloria was off for Arbor Day, a holiday that no employer save her school seemed to celebrate, and was curled up on the couch, catching up on the last Stephen King book,

She could change the narrative. How she would do that, Gloria had no idea. But she intended to figure it out. ****