Clive Barker > Quotes

“With the inevitability of a tongue returning to probe a painful tooth, we come back and back and back again to our fears, sitting to talk them over with the eagerness of a hungry man before a full and steaming plate.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volume Two

“Have patience; the lovers will suffer lovers always suffer.”
― Clive Barker, Galilee

“You'll learn, honey. Love can be the best thing in life. And it can be the worst. The absolute worst.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

“To dream in isolation can be properly splendid to be sure; but to dream in company seems to me infinitely preferable.”
― Clive Barker, Weave World

“Those old hypocrites. They talk about killing witches but the Good Book’s full of magic. Turning the Nile to blood and parting the Red Sea. What’s that if it’s not good old-fashioned magic? Want a little water into wine? No trouble! How about raising the dead man Lazarus? Just say the word!”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War

“Always, worlds within worlds.”
― Clive Barker, Weave World

“Study nothing except in the knowledge that you already knew it. Worship nothing except in adoration of your true self. And fear nothing except in the certainty that you are your enemy's begetter and its only hope of healing.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica

“I can see in your eyes that there’s no seam of untapped joy left in you. The best of life has come and gone. Those days when sudden epiphanies swept over you, and you had visions of the rightness of all things and of your place amongst them; they’re history. You’re in a darker place now.”
― Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone

“Mischief nodded. 'It's true,' he conceded. 'You're in the company of eight world-class thieves,' he said, not without a little touch of pride. 'Saints we are not.'
But then,' said Deaux-Deaux, 'who is?' he thought on this. 'Besides saints.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

“There’s no conscious thing on the face of the world that doesn’t know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volume Two

“Perhaps sunlight had always been luminous, and doorways signs of greater passage than that of one room to another. But she’d not noticed it until now.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica

“So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.”
― Clive Barker

“It was the pivotal teaching of Pluthero Quexos, the most celebrated dramatist of the Second Dominion, that in any fiction, no matter how ambitious its scope or profound its theme, there was only ever room for three players. Between warring kings, a peacemaker; between adoring spouses, a seducer or a child. Between twins, the spirit of the womb. Between lovers, Death. Greater numbers might drift through the drama, of course -- thousands in fact -- but they could only ever be phantoms, agents, or, on rare occasions, reflections of the three real and self-willed beings who stood at the center. And even this essential trio would not remain intact; or so he taught. It would steadily diminish as the story unfolded, three becoming two, two becoming one, until the stage was left deserted.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica

“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.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Let the mad find wisdom in their madness for the sane, and let the sane be grateful.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Absolute Midnight

“Maybe the man had taken the wrong turning, but at least he'd travelled some extraordinary roads.”
― Clive Barker, Weave World

“Memory, prophecy, and fantasy—
The past, the future, and
The dreaming moment between—
Are all in one country,
Living one immortal day.

To know that is Wisdom.

To use it is the Art.”
― Clive Barker, Everville

“We're both thieves, Harvey Swick. I take time. You take lives. But in the end we're the same: both Thieves of Always.”
― Clive Barker, The Thief of Always

“She's...just a girl, you know. Like most girls: something and nothing.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

“In this sense love is of a different order to any other phenomenon, for it may be both an event and a sign of that invisible mechanism I spoke of before; perhaps the finest sign, the most certain. In it’s throes we need neither luck nor science. We are the wheel, and the man who profits by it. We are the star, and the darkness it pierces. We are the butterfly, brief and beautiful.”
― Clive Barker, Galilee

“We are the star and the darkness it peirces”
― Clive Barker, Galilee

“Harvey wasn't interested in the clothes, it was the masks that mesmerized him. They were like snowflakes: no two alike. Some were made of wood and of plastic; some of straw and cloth and papier-mâché. Some were as bright as parrots, others as pale as parchment. Some were so grotesque he was certain they'd been carved by crazy people; others so perfect they looked like the death masks of angels. There were masks of clowns and foxes, masks like skulls decorated with real teeth, and one with carved flames instead of hair.”
― Clive Barker, The Thief of Always

“All is death, woman. All is pain. Love breeds loss. Isolation breeds resentment. No matter which way we turn, we are beaten. Our only true inheritance is death. And our only legacy, dust.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“..She had that brand of pragmatism that would find her the first brewing tea after Armageddon.”
― Clive Barker, Weave World

“We have great cities to visit: New York and Washington, Paris and London; and further east, and older than any of these, the legendary city of Samarkand, whose crumbling palaces and mosques still welcome travelers on the Silk road. Weary of cities? Then we’ll take to the wilds. To the islands of Hawaii and the mountains of Japan, to forests where Civil War dead still lie, and stretches of sea no mariner ever crossed. They all have their poetry: the glittering cities and the ruined, the watery wastes and the dusty; I want to show you them all. I want to show you everything.”
― Clive Barker, Galilee

“There are lives lived for love, and lives lived for art. We, happy band, have chosen the later persuasion.”
― Clive Barker

“being with people makes me vomit. I don't like em. I never did.”
― Clive Barker - Sacrament

“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.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Funny that. We live in islands of Hours and we never seem to have time enough for anything...”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Absolute Midnight

“As to my mouth, of all my features, I wish I could possess my mouth again, just as it had been before the fire. I had my mother’s lips, generous below and above; and what kissing I had practiced, mainly on my hand or on a lonely pig, had convinced me that my lips would be the source of my good fortune. I would kiss with them, and lie with them, I would make victims and willing slaves of anyone my eyes desired, simply by talking a little, and following the talk with kisses, and the kisses with demands. And they’d melt into compliance, everyone of them, happy to perform the most demeaning acts as long as I was there to reward them with a long, tongue-tied kiss when they were done. But the fire didn’t spare my lips; it took them too, erasing them utterly.”
― Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone