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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

There were so many ways a person could die.

There's nothing scarier than groupthink.

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

No one hated him more than his fans.

Whistling past the graveyard.

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.

anyone in horror’s path is irrevocably altered.

He could wait, because hatred is patient.

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

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

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

The Night Managers.

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

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

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.

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

Human beings' capacity to adjust to almost anything was supposed to be one of their greatest virtues, but it was also one of their greatest weaknesses. It rendered them compliant, allowed them to be exploited.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”)

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.

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

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. ****

torn faded Levis and a denim shirt.

Her life slid away, replaced by a new one, and even as Gloria tried to hang on to this reality, she felt it slipping, supplanted by another correlated existence.

I know Triple A still does, but with everyone using GPS and MapQuest and GoogleMaps and what have you,

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.

it amounts to little more than an assertion that what is exceptional is incredible because it is not ordinary, and that ostensible miracles are to be disbelieved on the grounds that they would be miraculous.

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

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

1443 Sherwood #7.

He picked up the envelope. His name was on the front, written in a shaky, childish scrawl. He tore the envelope open and pulled out the piece of paper inside. On it were written two words in that same shaky hand: Stay Away

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.

He stared out the window and found himself thinking of that old Randy Newman song, "It's Money That Matters." It was money that mattered, wasn't it? He shook his head. Times had changed. Twenty years ago-a decade ago, even-a rich man spending millions of dollars to get himself elected to public office would have been looked upon with suspicion and distrust. But in 1992, the town had voted overwhelmingly for Ross Perot, either buying completely into his "common man" persona and believing that the billionaire was more like them than were either of his two opponents, or else respecting and admiring his enormous wealth

Instead, the grass kept getting thicker and taller, and soon I was lost

was in room 212 instead of room 215.

The two were connected somehow, intertwined with the movements and actions of a terrifyingly evil clown.

At the time, I was under the spell of William Faulkner

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

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

He got angry at me because my unhappiness meant that his emotion was not recycled.

He provides a long passage ascribed to the (largely mythical) Tantric sage Padmasambhava and then breathlessly informs his readers that nothing remotely as profound is to be found anywhere in the religious texts of the West—though, really, the passage is little more than a formulaic series of mystic platitudes, of the sort to be found in every religion’s contemplative repertoire, describing the kind of oceanic ecstasy that Christian mystical tradition tends to treat as one of the infantile stages of the contemplative life.

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!

Much worse than yours.

some small stuff like Gordon’s cat.

We had Kennedy shot; we can arrange something for you as well.

You like what I do to you, don’t you, baby girl? You like being my dirty little girl. You can’t get enough of my cock.

1855

bought their groceries at Safeway and shopped for everything else at The Store.

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.

But it seemed to her that people these days, even in small towns, perhaps especially in small towns, had lost whatever sense of tolerance had enabled America to forge a unified nation out of the diverse peoples that coexisted within its borders.

3907!

There comes a point, she thought, when what you do as a temporary stopgap until you “find” yourself hardens into your actual personality. The person you pretended to be, while waiting to discover who you are, becomes the real you.

He looked down at the enclosed Xerox, started reading: From Thomas Jefferson’s Diary: April 15 I am Awake again well before Dawn because of that Infernal Dream engendered by the Figure Shown to Me by Franklin. It is the Fifth Time I have Had the Dream. Did I not Know Franklin so well, I would Believe Him a Practitioner of Witchcraft and the Black Arts. The Doll, if Doll it Be, Appeared to be Made from Twigs and Straw and Pieces of Human Hair and Toe-nail. The Totality was Glued together by what seemed an Unsavory Substance that Franklin and I Took to be Dried Seed from the Male Sex. Franklin Claims that He has Seen a Similar Figure in his Travels although He Cannot Remember Where. For My Part, I would Never have Forgotten such an Object or Whence I first Discovered It, as I Will Not Forget It Now. Against My Wishes and Advice, Franklin has Taken the Doll into his House. He Intends to Keep It in his Study so that He may Perform some of his Experiments upon It. I Bade Him Leave it in the Spirit House in which He Discovered It, but Franklin is not a Man who Takes Readily to Suggestion. I am Frightened for Franklin and, indeed, for All of Us. At the bottom of the diary entry was a detailed piece of artwork in Jefferson’s own hand. A detailed rendering that was clearly identifiable and instantly recognizable. It was a drawing of the house.

The Ones Who Went Before.” The name, with its ambiguity and intimations of tremendous age, frightened him, and he listened quietly as Mr. Billings described the early days, after the barrier was erected, the days of miracles, when gods and monsters roamed the earth, when seas were parted, when oracles foretold the future, when miraculous beings and the resurrected dead mingled with ordinary men. After the House became occupied, he explained, as it gained strength and became more efficient, more attuned to its purpose, those “leaks” were plugged, all access to the Other Side was sealed off.

Being here reminded him of what he’d thought as a child, what he’d planned, and the realization that the future he’d been so eagerly awaiting had already passed left him somewhat heavy-hearted. For the first time in his life, he truly felt his age.

You get more spiritual as you get older,” Hal said. “I don’t know if it’s because you get scared since you’re closer to death, or because you’re actually wiser than you used to be, but you start thinking about spiritual things, wondering why we’re here, what the point of it all is, whether there’s anything else.

A deist, perhaps, like Thomas Jefferson, an adherent to the clockmaker theory. He believed that God had created everything, had set it in motion, but was now on to other projects and other planets, trusting his creation to run in the way he’d intended and not deigning to bother in the affairs of men.

Maybe it was a pet cemetery.

because literally any time is sooner than later except ‘later,’ which is not only vague and unspecified but isn’t even a quantifiable time.

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

But he wasn’t a detective, and he wasn’t one of those plucky amateurs who, in movies and books, took it upon themselves to solve a crime.

Love wasn’t perfect, she realized. It didn’t cure all ills and didn’t solve all problems and wasn’t always what was needed. It also wasn’t equal. There was a hierarchy of love, some people you loved more than others, and it did make a difference. Sometimes just loving someone was not enough. Sometimes you had to love someone enough.

It was a strange facet of human nature, but horror was much more frightening on a small scale than a large one.

Shine him on?

And 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.

The ease with which Americans often confuse their civic and fiscal values with Christian virtues is always a little baffling,

How obvious it seems to me now, how pure and lucid. Here, clearly, is an ideal model of the diabolical: cold, grasping, bleak, graceless, and dull; unctuous, sleek, pitiless, and crass; a pallid vulgarian with poutish effeminate lips, bulging jowls, and a grotesque coiffeur, floating through life on clouds of acrid cologne and trailed by a vanguard of fawning divorce lawyers. That, I suspect, is the dreary truth of the matter: the devil is probably eerily similar to Donald Trump—though perhaps just a little nicer.

...und was lediglich eine saisonale Wampe gewesen war, war jetzt sein dauerhafter Ganzjahresbauch.

I thought I’d been getting along fine with the weekend visits and occasional summer sleepovers, but suddenly I was aware of all I’d missed, the little intimate everyday things that amounted to a real relationship. I remembered Dad tucking me in at night when I was little, sitting next to me on the couch watching TV, taking me to the hardware store with him to buy some small item he needed and, afterward, stopping off to get an ice cream cone. Despite everything everyone said about spending “quality time” with kids, I realized that it was “quantity time” that was more important. I never cared what I did with my dad, I just wanted to be with him for as much time as possible.

We believe that the dead have power,” May translated. The old man gestured toward the corner of his room, where framed black and white photos of an Asian man and woman stood between two sticks of incense in front of a red backdrop decorated with gold lettering.

and I passed an Arby’s and The Store before my GPS told me to turn right off the main street.

It was in that old Yellow Front building past the corp yard. The one they’re tearing down now for The Store. It’s been empty for a long time, but some lady reported seeing teenagers breaking in. So I went over to check it out.” There was a brief pause. “The shadows were in there.

I was reminded of the Winchester Mystery House, which I’d seen as a child on a trip with my parents. From above, there was the same sort of random conglomeration—peaked roofs connected to flat roofs, shakes and shingles, tarpaper and skylights—and I realized that Frank had constructed his house from the town, connecting the buildings until they made one enormous edifice. “Jesus,” I breathed.

The current fashion in belligerent atheism usually involves flinging condemnations around with a kind of gallant extravagance, more or less in the direction of all faiths at once, with little interest in precise aim; I would not want to be any less generous in response.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Samantha. Juniper, Arizona.

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?

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

It is a haunted place, strange with secrets.

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

I figure little Miss Torific has lost her mind—until I see the motorcycles. “Oh no you don’t! Not those! No way!” “You had no problem stealing a quarter-million-dollar Bentley,” Frieden challenges.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

saturnalia.

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.

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.

she passed by the edge of the crowd, keeping a wide berth around a red-faced older woman who was shaking her fist in the air and shouting, “I want my country back!” When did people get so angry? Claire wondered.

I did not know if they were part of another dimension that shared the same space as our own or if there was some other explanation, all I knew was that this other world was intruding on my space with greater frequency and greater intensity.

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.

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

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. 

This was the west and we were westerners, and no bureaucrat in Washington was going to regulate what our companies did in our state. So, we gulped down hot smog and pretended like we enjoyed it because we were too fucking stupid to look out for our own best interests.

We rolled on. The dirty red truck sat up big and obvious, three hundred yards ahead. It bore left around the southern fringe of Atlanta. Setting itself to strike out west, across the country. The distribution theory was looking good. I slowed down and hung back through the interchange. Didn’t want the driver to get suspicious about being followed. But I could see by the way he was handling his lane changes this was not a guy who made much use of his rearview mirrors. I closed up a little tighter. The red truck rolled on. I stayed eight cars behind it. Time rolled by. It got late in the afternoon. It got to be early evening. I ate candy and sipped water for dinner as I drove. I couldn’t work the radio. It was some kind of a fancy Japanese make. The guy at the auto shop must have transplanted it. Maybe it was busted. I wondered how he was doing with tinting the Bentley’s windows. I wondered what Charlie was going to say about getting her car back with black glass. I figured maybe that was going to be the least of her worries. We rolled on. We rolled on for almost four hundred miles. Eight hours. We drove out of Georgia, right through Alabama, into the northeast corner of Mississippi. It got pitch dark. The fall sun had dropped away up ahead. People had switched their lights on. We drove on through the dark for hours. It felt like I had been following the guy all my life. Then, approaching midnight, the red truck slowed down. A half-mile ahead, I saw it pull off into a truck stop in the middle of nowhere. Near a place called Myrtle. Maybe sixty miles short of the Tennessee state line. Maybe seventy miles shy of Memphis. I followed the truck into the lot. Parked up well away from it. I saw the driver get out. A tall, thickset type of a guy. Thick neck and wide, powerful shoulders. Dark, in his thirties. Long arms, like an ape. I knew who he was. He was Kliner’s son. A stone-cold psychopath. I watched him. He did some stretching and yawning in the dark standing by his truck. I stared at him and pictured him Thursday night, at the warehouse gate, dancing. THE KLINER KID LOCKED UP THE TRUCK AND AMBLED OFF

When the aspiring ape ceases to think himself a fallen angel, perhaps he will inevitably resign himself to being an ape, and then become contented with his lot, and ultimately even rejoice that the universe demands little more from him than an ape’s contentment.

On the day of the murder I went to work in a clown suit.

He thought once again that behind the pleasant façade of ordinary society was a darker secret world that the general public knew nothing about.

Strange things were going on beneath the surface of everyday life, actions and events of which ordinary people were not aware, and while ostensibly, there were no similarities between any of them, behind the superficial differences, he sensed parallels and recurring configurations.

It just seems to me that most journalists don’t do their job these days. They’ll quote someone on one side of a story, then get a quote from someone else on the other side, print them both and pretend as though that’s a balanced article. There’s no attempt made to check the facts, to do a little research and determine which side is right. I’m not talking about opinions here.

people voted not on issues but name recognition.

These were the jobs we settled for when our dreams died.

I realized that I had gone for a whole day without speaking, without uttering a single, solitary word.

Even playing Monopoly or seeing pictures of money made test subjects feel more self-sufficient and thus behave more antisocially.

Magic has no laws,

a single red rose.

one single shiny ultra-white tooth.

Change came in the form of a woman. Doesn’t it always?

and he picked up on the nineteenth ring, obviously

If life had gone on as normal, he would have been too busy to notice the singularities and inconsistencies that now jumped out at him.

It was a confluence of events that had brought them to this point, and what frightened him was the idea that there might be no turning back. This could very well be the world in which they now lived.

I recently read an Evangelical apologist for the infernalist orthodoxies argue that it is morally correct for the saved to cease from pity for the damned simply because such pity is fruitless, just as it is forgivable to avert one’s eyes from a frightful accident on the roads from which one cannot rescue the victims, and to cease to think about it entirely. This, it should be needless to say, is nothing more than a counsel of moral imbecility. Neither can my pity for a little girl dying of cancer cure her, for what that is worth; but what an atrocity of a man I would be if I ceased pitying her for that reason.

There is a sort of instantaneous antipathy between people who don’t get along, an unspoken recognition acknowledged by both parties,

On a track that is new to you, drive all corners with a late apex at first. This will allow you a little extra room on the exit if you find the turn is a little tighter than you thought. Then, with each lap, move the apex earlier and earlier in the turn until you are beginning to run out of track on the exit. Then go back to where you could accelerate out of the corner and still stay on the track. That’s the ideal apex.

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.