Clive Barker > Quotes

“except that she was sleeping not in preparation for a new day but for endless night.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“I don’t remember nineteen,” Will said. “Or twenty, come to that. I have a very vague recollection of twenty-one—” He laughed. “But you get to a place when you’re so high you’re not high anymore.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“A feeling of intense loss overwhelmed him for a moment as he thought of his once-charmed life—of love, and magic, and friends, all of it, and all of them, dead.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“and what constitutes the making of a true storyteller; someone who speaks directly to the reader’s dreams with dreams of their own.”
― Clive Barker, Where Nightmares Come From

“And why not? The world made miracles like this every moment of every day: egg into chick, seed into flower, maggot into fly. Now man into fox? was that possible?
Oh yes, said the House of the World. Yes, and yes, and always yes-”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“Nothing would take him, he was a barbarian with the manners of a gentleman. Neither”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“Arnie had always called her a dreamer, and maybe he was right about that.”
― Clive Barker, Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

“Everybody is a book of blood; Wherever we’re opened, we’re red. The Book of Blood The dead have highways.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vol. 1

“She was liquid; a boundless sea in a single body, a deluge in a small room, and I will gladly drown in her, if she grants me the chance.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“If you were alone on earth, what would you know? What the mirror told you, that's all. The rest would be myth and conjecture.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 3

“I love you,”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Heaven will provide. Or else it won't, and I'll go hungry.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat: Absolute Midnight

“But darkness loved lovers, even if the world no longer did.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica: Featuring New Illustrations and an Appendix

“Whatever you do, don’t look back.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“Let’s prioritise here. At the risk of stating the obvious, this isn’t going to be easy. We need to find Norma as fast as we can, avoid the powerful demon that wants me as his slave, and then get the fuck out of Hell. I’m sure we’ll encounter some heinous, unthinkable, soul-scarring shit along the way, but hopefully we make it out alive.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“Somebody’s voice rose in prayer, another simply sobbed. What grief was this? Not his passing, surely. He was too minor to earn such lamentation.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica: A spellbinding epic fantasy novel

“...es mejor estar preparados para lo peor y es de sabios aprender a caminar antes de perder el aliento.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume One

“Imagination was true power: it worked transformations wealth and influence never could.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“I used to live in Los Angeles,” Norma said. “Off a winding road called Coldheart Canyon.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“I thought I'd gone to the limits,' Frank explains. 'I hadn't. The Cenobites gave me an experience beyond limits. Pain and pleasure, indivisible....Some things have to be endured. Take it from me. And that's what makes the pleasures so sweet.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“You don’t think that room downstairs was made by the Devil, or his wife?” “I don’t want to know who made it,” Tammy said. “But I know who fed it; who made it important. People. Just like you and me. Addicted to the place.”
― Clive Barker, Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

“He told me he loved me, Clem.’ Oh Lord.’ ‘And I believed him.’ ‘How many dozens of men have told you that?’ ‘Yes, but he was different ‘Famous last words.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica: A spellbinding epic fantasy novel

“Experience was made up of endless ambiguities—of motive, of feeling, of cause and effect—and if he was to win under such circumstances, he had to understand how those ambiguities worked.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“Non c'è mai nulla che cominci.
Non esiste un primo momento: non v'è parola o luogo da cui nasca questa storia o qualunque altra. Tutte le trame si possono sempre far risalire a qualche narrazione precedente, e alle narrazioni ancora anteriori, anche se, via via che la voce narrante si allontana, il legame sembrerà divenire più tenue, perché ogni epoca vorrà che la vicenda venga narrata come se fosse una sua creazione.
Così, ciò che è pagano verrà santificato, ciò che è tragico diventerà risibile; i grandi amanti si piegheranno al sentimentalismo, e i demoni si ridurranno a giocattoli a molla.
Nulla è fisso. La spola va e viene, realtà e finzione, intelletto e materia, tessendo trame che possono avere in comune una cosa soltanto: in esse è nascosta una filigrana che con il tempo diventerà un mondo.

Quindi dev'essere arbitrario il luogo dove decidiamo di imbarcarci. Un luogo a mezza strada fra un passato semidimenticato e un futuro appena intravisto.
Questo luogo, per esempio.”
― Clive Barker, Weave World

“Was that what made him a European? To want to have his story told once more, passed down the line to another eager listener who would, in his time, disregard its lesson and repeat his own suffering? Ah, how he loved tradition.”
― Clive Barker, The Damnation Game

“Sure, work could be a pain in the ass, but it was purpose, and what was a life, any life, his life, without purpose?”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels

“Nothing is fixed. In and out the shuttle goes fact and fiction, mind and matter, woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden amongst them is a filigree which will with time become a world.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“But better to be buried in the rubble than succumb to the Mask. And be flattered, at the end, that Fate had at least offered her a choice of extinctions.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Sanity is a movable feast. One man's madness is another's politics.”
― Clive Barker, In the Flesh