Clive Barker > Quotes

“Not a classic reunion. The lover, on seeing his beloved, throws up down his shirt. But then, nothing that happened between Jacqueline and myself was ever quite normal.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“The seasons long for each other, like men and women, in order that they may be cured of their excesses.

Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench its heat, and the mellowest of autumns will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its fruitfulness.

Even winter—the hardest season, the most implacable—dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.

So August gave way to September and there were few complaints.”
― Clive Barker

“You’ve got blood on your hands, and you smell of coitus.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica: Featuring New Illustrations and an Appendix

“The extraordinary thing is this: that the moment you make a story or create an image that finds favour with an audience, you’ve effectively lost it. It toddles off, the little bastard; it becomes the property of the fans. It’s they who create around it their own mythologies; who make sequels and prequels in their imagination; who point out the inconsistencies in your plotting. I can envisage no greater compliment. What more could a writer or a film maker ever ask, than that their fiction be embraced and become part of the dream-lives of people who it’s likely he’ll never meet?”
― Clive Barker, Clive Barker's Hellraiser Vol. 1

“Your kind has a supersitious terror of things ugly and broken; you gear that their conditon may somehow infect you.”
― Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone

“The Monastery of the Cenobitical Order was a large-walled compound built seven hundred thousand years ago on a damned-made hill of stone and cement.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“Forgive yourself,’ Boone said. ‘I did.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“I can guess what you think about her, and I’d probably be thinking the same thing if I was standing where you are. But I’m not. I’m here. You’re there. It’s fucking miles, Will.” He drew a short, almost panicked breath. “I’m dying. And I don’t like it. I’m not at peace, I’m not reconciled—” He turned to claim the joint back from Will. “I’m not . . . finished with being here. Not. Remotely. Finished.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“Obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius, they advised. Let the obscure be explained by the more obscure, the unknown by the more unknown.”
― Clive Barker, The Great And Secret Show

“That which is imagined need never be lost.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“But the strongest scent was also the oldest – it was the perfume of his transgressions. There were other smells, too, some of which she could name – incense, books, sweat – and far, far more that she had no name for.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“We are all our own graveyards I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were.”
― Clive Barker

“Nor in prayer either. He had told Billy the truth, about his giving up God when his prayers for his father’s life had gone unanswered. Of such divine neglect was aetheism made; belief could not be rekindled now, however profound his terror.”
― Clive Barker, Books Of Blood Omnibus 2: Volumes 4-6

“Comenzó a caer por una espiral descendiente. Pasó tres meses sumergido en un baño de depresión y autocompasión que lo llevó al borde del suicidio. Pero su recién descubierto nihilismo le negó incluso esa solución.

Si no había nada que valiera la pena vivirse, de eso se deducía que tampoco había nada por lo que valiera la pena morir, ¿verdad? Avanzó a los tumbos de una esterilidad a la siguiente, hasta que todas sus ideas se echaron a perder por obra del narcótico, cualquiera que fuese, que sus inmoralidades le proporcionaban.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“He was mystery, he was darkness, he was all she had dreamed of. And if she would only free him he would service her -oh yes- until her pleasure reached that thereshold that, like all theresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Nothing’s right .... except what you feel and know.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Yes, he knew his face was finely made, his forehead broad, his gaze haunting, his lips sculpted so that even a sneer looked fetching on them, but he needed a living mirror to tell him so.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica: Featuring New Illustrations and an Appendix

“He took a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped hard at his mouth, back and forth, as though a residue of guilt clung there and he was afraid it would give him away.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica: Featuring New Illustrations and an Appendix

“I want an explanation!” “I’ll give you one,” Maxine said: “You’re crazy.”
― Clive Barker, Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

“I lived, I suppose, in a cell of my own creation, while outside its walls lay a landscape of unparalleled richness. But I could not bear to venture there. In my self-delusion I thought I was a minor king, and I didn’t want to step beyond the bounds of what I knew for fear I lost my dominion.”
― Clive Barker, Galilee

“She was indeed tired , as she'd claimed , but it wasn't the cooking that exhausted her. It was the effort of suppressing her contempt for he damn fools who were gathered in the lounge below. She'd called them friends once , these half-wits , with their poor jokes and poorer pretensions.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“she knew from experience there was no gainsaying the bigotry of faith.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Hate remembered though; hate remembered long after love had forgotten”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“What marked this place as another Dominion was the people in the streets outside, some human, many not, all retreating from the wind or the commotions it carried.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica: Featuring New Illustrations and an Appendix

“Not a whisper of flatulence would dare this man’s bowels.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“lot”
― Clive Barker, The Thief of Always: A Fable

“Of all the rash and midnight promises made in the name of love, none, Boone now knew, was more certain to be broken than “I’ll never leave you.” What”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“They looked, to all intents and purposes, like living men and women. But then wasn't that the trick of their craft? To imitate life so well the illusion was indistinguishable from the real thing?”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“En el mundo hay algo peor que el Terror... Hay sueños que se vuelven realidad.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume One

“Who in their right minds would trust someone who made a profession out of poking around in sick people?”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 4