Clive Barker > Quotes

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― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“He had certainly set his eyes on more voluptuous creatures , but something about her lack of glamour engaged him. Such women were in his experience often more entertaining company than beauties like Julia. They could be flattered or bullied into acts the beauties would never countenance and be grateful for the attention.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“She was so beautiful, you see. Not in any two-dimensional sense: she wasn’t young, she wasn’t innocent, she didn’t have that pristine symmetry so favored by ad-men and photographers. Her face was plainly that of a woman in her early forties: it had been used to laugh and cry, and usage leaves its marks. But she had a power to transform herself, in the subtlest way, making that face as various as the sky.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“So many masks. Was she the only one who had no secret life, no other self in marrow or mind?”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“The carcass closest to him was the remains of the pimply youth he'd seen in Car One. The body hung upside-down, swinging back and forth to the rhythm of the train, in unison with its three fellows; an obscene danse macabre. Its arms dangled loosely from the shoulder joints, into which gashes an inch or two deep had been made, so the bodies would hang more neatly.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“Our lives are scattered throughout with periods of unbelonging; in childhood, of course, and adolescence; but in adulthood too, when sudden loss (or gain) forces us to reassess things we believe immutable.”
― Clive Barker, The Nightbreed Chronicles

“So quickly? Todd cleared away another wave of tears and looked down at the body on the table. Dempsey’s eye was still half-open, but it didn’t look back at him any longer. Where there’d been a sliver of bright life, where there’d been mischief and shared rituals—where, in short, there’d been Dempsey—there was nothing.”
― Clive Barker, Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

“The sight of her had pierced him, making her the enterer, had she but known it, and him the entered. Perhaps she had known, on reflection. Perhaps she’d fled from his passivity, from his ease beneath the spike of her beauty. If so, he would undo her revulsion with tonight’s business. Here,”
― Clive Barker, Imajica: Featuring New Illustrations and an Appendix

“He had seen her wake in the morning like a slut, and pick murdered men from between her teeth, and suicides from the tangles of her hair. He had seen her late at night, her dirty back streets shamelessly courting depravity. He had watched her in the hot afternoon, sluggish and ugly, indifferent to the atrocities that were being committed every hour in her throttled passages. It was no Palace of Delights.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“The wind was not invisible. It had a texture, as though it carried a weight of dust, the motes steadily gumming up her eyes and sealing her nose, finding its way into her underwear and up into her body by those routes too.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Es war ekelerregend, es war sauberste Arbeit, und es verwirrte zutiefst.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume One

“Whoopee,’ she said quietly, on her face the distracted look that had obsessed so many of the opposite sex over the years. She’d forgotten most of them. The ones who’d fought over her; the ones who’d lost their wives in their pursuit of her; even those who’d sold their sanity to find her equal: all were forgotten. History had never much engaged her. It was the future that glittered in her mind’s eye, now more than ever.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica: A spellbinding epic fantasy novel

“No. No, I’m not.” Then she said: “I’m somebody else. I just don’t know who that somebody else is yet.” “Well that’s what journeys are for,” Diamanda Murkitt said.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

“Had Harry been born under a star less kind, he might well have ended up among the city’s nomadic visionaries, his days taken up with begging for enough money to buy some liquid oblivion, his nights spent trying to find a place where he could not hear the adversaries singing as they went about their labors of the dark. They had only ever sung one song within earshot of Harry, and that was “Danny Boy,” that hymn to death and maudlin sentiment that Harry had heard so often that he knew the words by heart.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“You’re right, of course. I haven’t come this far to deliver us into oblivion. I have such sights to show you. Soon, you will have answers to questions you have never even dared to ask.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“Harry knew very little about architecture but enough to know that Lucifer’s labors here had later inspired a whole architecture of the living world and their own Gothic creations. He’d been inside some of them on his travels around Europe, in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Santa Eulalia in Barcelona, in Bourdeaux Cathedral, and of course in Chartres Cathedral, where he’d once taken sanctuary, having just killed in the blizzard-blinded streets a demon who had been seducing infants to their deaths with corrupt nursery rhymes.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“...Ili je pakao možda jedna soba, jedan krevet i večno uzbuđenje i želja, i ja sam bio u njemu, video sam njegovu lepotu, i ako stvari krenu najgorim tokom izdržaću.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“This was the substance of every moment, she realized: the body - never certain if the next lungful would be its last - hovering for a tiny time between cessation and continuance. And in that space out of time, between a breath expelled and another drawn, the miraculous was easy, because neither flesh nor reason has laid their edicts there.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica

“O tempo seria precioso, daí em diante. continuaria a passar despercebido, é claro, como sempre, mas Harvey estava determinado a não desperdiçá-lo com suspiros e queixumes. Preencheria cada momentos com as estações que encontrara no coração: esperança, coo pássaros, nos ramos da Primavera; felicidade como um Sol quente de Verão; magia, coo as inesperadas neblinas de Outono. E o melhor de tudo: o amor - amor suficiente para durar mil Natais.”
― Clive Barker, The Thief of Always

“There were no chambers now along the passageway and consequently no lights. There was a glow up ahead, however—fitful and cold, but bright enough to illuminate both the ground she stumbled over, which was bare earth, and the silvery frost on the walls.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Everything tires with time , and starts to seek some opposition , to save it from itself.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Be strong, little mother,” she said to Melissa. “I know you can be.” “Yes?” Melissa said a little doubtfully.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

“Lo tocó como nunca antes se había atrevido a hacerlo, acariciando su cuerpo con la punta de los dedos muy, muy suavemente, recorriendo la piel levantada como una mujer ciega leyendo braille.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume One

“Eu não sabia o que estava a perder', disse Harvey.
'Ah...', disse Hood, suavemente 'mas não é sempre assim que as coisas se passam? Há coisas que nos deslizam pelos dedos e só quando se vão embora é que nos arrependemos. Mas aquilo que se vai embora não volta, Harvey Swick!”
― Clive Barker, The Thief of Always

“Their ascent was accomplished via a wide spiral staircase that sat within the reflective tube. Each of the metal steps were welded to its core. But even here in this elegant construct, the infernal touch hadn’t been neglected. Each of the steps was set not at ninety degrees to the core, but at ninety-seven, or a hundred, or a hundred and five, each one different from the one before but all sending out the same message: nothing was certain here; nothing was safe. There was no railing to break the slide should someone lose their footing, only step after disquieting step designed to make the ascent as vertiginous as possible.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“Odiaba las fiestas. Las sonrisas pegadas con engrudo para tapar el pánico, las miradas que había que interpretar y lo peor de todo: la conversación.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“I can certainly throw out some observation about the process of creating which may be of use. Firstly, it's the best & the worst of worlds, because the only fuel you have to make the fire blaze on the page / screen is the stuff of your own being. An artist consumes his or herself in the act of making art. I can feel that consumption even now, sitting here at my desk at the end of a working day. In order to generate the ideas that I have set on the page for the last 10 or 11 hours I have burned the fuel of my own history. This is, obviously a double-edged sword. In order to give, the artist must take from himself. That's the deal. And it's very important to me that the work I do is the best I can make it, because I know what is being burned up to create. As the villain of Sacrament says: "living & dying, we feed the fire.”
― Clive Barker

“Do you understand?” the figure beside the first speaker demanded. Its voice, unlike that of its companion, was light and breathy—the voice of an excited girl. Every inch of its head had been tattooed with an intricate grid, and at every intersection of horizontal and vertical axes a jeweled pin driven through to the bone. Its tongue was similarly decorated. “Do you even know who we are?” it asked.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Its face crinkled up grotesquely, the eyes narrowing like those of a laughing Buddha, the lips peeling back to expose a sickle of brilliant teeth.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 6

“The presence of phantoms – everywhere – their faces, ripe with need and unspent passion, trailing their hunger like pollen from flowers that were past their hour but refused to wither and disappear.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels