Clive Barker > Quotes

“True joy is a profound remembering; and true grief the same.”
― Clive Barker, Weave World

“I was born alive. Isn’t that punishment enough?”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Help me', he said, like a lost child.

Go to Hell, the room respectfully replied; and for the first time in his life, he knew exactly what that meant.”
― Clive Barker

“You’ve always got me”
“Always?”
“Didn’t I just say so?”
“Yes”
“Am I liar? “
“No.” I lied.”
― Clive Barker, Mister B. Gone

“The pain, I can assure you, will be exquisite.”
― Clive Barker, The Forbidden

“It is great good health to believe as the Hindus do that there are 33 million gods and goddesses in the world. It is great good health to want to understand one s dreams. It is great good health to desire the ambiguous and paradoxical. It is sickness of the profoundest kind to believe that there is one reality. There is sickness in any piece of work or any piece of art seriously attempting to suggest that the idea that there is more than one reality is somehow redundant.”
― Clive Barker

“His body and his mind went about their different businesses. The former, freed from conscious instruction, breathed, rolled, sweated, and digested. The latter went dreaming.”
― Clive Barker, Imajica

“And this story, having no beginning, will have no end.”
― Clive Barker, Weave World

“Gather experience... Look at what you should not look at. A feeling of anxiety is the sure and certain evidence that you should do this.”
― Clive Barker

“Let the void come, and bring an end to the tyranny of hope.”
― Clive Barker, Weave World

“I dreamed a limitless book,

A book unbound,

Its leaves scattered in fantastic abundance.


On every line there was a new horizon drawn,

New heavens supposed;

New states, new souls.


One of those souls,

Dozing through some imagined afternoon,

Dreamed these words.

And needing a hand to set them down,

Made mine.”
― Clive Barker

“There is no delight the equal of dread”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three

“Whatever capacity she possesses to supernaturally beguile a human soul—and she possesses many—she liked his clear-sightedness too well, to blind him that way.”
― Clive Barker, Galilee

“You are my beauty, my body, perfected. All I was drained off into you. When you left, my health went with you - leaving a moral morbidity I smell in my sleep. The acts I committed for the love of you. Acts I can never forget. I crawled into the bellies of the dead to fish out a little life... I have an appetite for it now. I have an unrelenting lust for death.”
― Clive Barker

“(...) An amalgam of sexual excess and demonic elegance, as likely to fuck you as tear out your heart.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three

“There must still be room for the falling note, of course. Even in an undying world there are times when beauty passes from sight, or love passes from the heart, and we feel the sorrow of partition.”
― Clive Barker, Galilee

“Journey to the end of day,
Come the fire-fly,
Come the moon;
Say a prayer for God's good grace
And sleep with lore upon your face.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

“What is now proved was once only imagined.”
― Clive Barker, Weaveworld

“Your flesh is killing your spirit. You have forsaken yourself.”
― Clive Barker

“You can plan to be brave - it's even better if you just try to be brave.”
― Clive Barker

“Of course it’s the apparently tranquil periods that deceive us. Though our instruments or our senses or our wits may not be able to see the processes that are leading toward these clusters of events, they’re happening. The star, the wheel, the butterfly—all are in a subtle state of unrest, waiting for the moment when some invisible mechanism signals that the time has come. Then the star explodes; the wheel makes poor men rich; the butterfly mates and dies.”
― Clive Barker, Galilee

“I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories. This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being, but left the end of our story untold. That mystery is troubling to us. How could it be otherwise? Without the final part, we think, how are we to make sense of all that went before: which is to say, our lives?

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, Sacrament

“‎"Magic is the first and last religion of the world. It has the power to make us whole, to open our eyes to the Dominions and return us to ourselves. Everything that isn't us is also ourselves. We're joined to everything that was, is and will be. From one end of the Imajica to another. From the tiniest mote dancing over this flame to the Godhead Itself.”
― Clive Barker

“Sooner or later even the most ambitious glutton must crawl away and seek the solace of the vomitorium.”
― Clive Barker, Coldheart Canyon

“Behind their eyes the hope was sickening and in many, dead. They lived from event to event with a subtle terror of the gap between, filling up their lives with distractions to avoid the emptiness where curiosity should have been.”
― Clive Barker

“My feet are killing me."
"I knew somebody who had feet like that. They'd walk all over him. Archie Kashanian was his name. He used to wake up with footprints all over his chest, all over his face. It was the death of him, finally.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

“To you who have never died, may I say: Welcome to the world!”
― Clive Barker

“My father used to say: Every bird is one bird, and every book is one book, and every bird and every book is one thing too, under the words and the feathers." He finished with a flourish, as though the meaning of this was self-evident.”
― Clive Barker, Everville

“There was a memory and a promise of blood in the air.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume One

“Living in Hell kept him aware of the possibility of Heaven, and he’d never felt more alive.”
― Clive Barker, The Scarlet Gospels