The Hellbound Heart Quotes

“No tears, please. It's a waste of good suffering.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“She had opened a door... and now she was walking with demons. And at the end of her travels, she would have her revenge... Pain had made a sadist of her.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“She wanted nothing that he could offer her, except perhaps his absence.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“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

“Well, here he was. They could save each other, the way the poets promised lovers should. 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 threshold that, like all thresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished. Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa. And he knew it well enough to call it home.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“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

“Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa. And he knew it well enough to call it home.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“The flawlessly beautiful were flawlessy happy, weren't they? To Kristy this had always seemed self-evident. Tonight, however, the alcohol made her wonder if envy hadn't blinded her. Perhaps to be flawless was another kind of sadness.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Everywhere, in the wreckage around him, he found evidence to support the same bitter thesis: that he had encountered nothing in his life—no person, no state of mind or body—he wanted sufficiently to suffer even passing discomfort for.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“If nothing was worth living for it followed, didn’t it, that there was nothing worth dying for either.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“She had long ago accepted that life was unfair. But why , when she'd accepted the bitter truth , did circumstance insist on rubbing her face in it?”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“It was that sleep itself—the act of closing the eyes and relinquishing control of her consciousness—was something she was temperamentally unsuited to.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“In moments they would be here — the ones Kircher had called the Cenobites, theologians of the Order of the Gash. Summoned from their experiments in the higher reaches of pleasure, to bring their ageless heads into a world of rain and failure.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Outside, somewhere near, the world would soon be waking. He had watched it wake from the window of this very room, day after day, stirring itself to another round of fruitless pursuits, and he’d known, known, that there was nothing left out there to excite him.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“No tears, please. It’s a waste of good suffering.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“The bare bulb in the middle of the room dimmed and brightened, brightened and dimmed again. It had taken on the rhythm of the bell, burning its hottest on each chime. In the troughs between the chimes the darkness in the room became utter; it was as if the world he had occupied for twenty-nine years had ceased to exist. Then the bell would sound again, and the bulb burn so strongly it might never have faltered, and for a few precious seconds he was standing in a familiar place, with a door that led out and down and into the street, and a window through which-had he but the will (or strength) to tear the blinds back-he might glimpse a rumor of morning.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“A skin was nothing. Pigs had skins; snakes had skins. They were knitted of dead cells, shed and grown and shed again. But a name? That was a spell, which summoned memories.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“He spoke of both dancing and death with equal nonchalance, as though one carried as little significance as the other. It calmed her, hearing him talk that way.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“No passion, only sudden lust, and just as sudden indifference.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“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, The Hellbound Heart

“Your most treasured depravity is child’s play beside the experiences we offer.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“The seasons long for each other, like men and women, in order that they may be cured of their excesses.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“But if it failed to show itself she would not grieve too deeply, for fear that the mending of broken hearts be a puzzle neither wit nor time had the skill to solve.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“But everything slipped through his fingers sooner or later, and with time he began to wonder whether it was circumstance that denied him a good hold on his earnings, or whether he simply didn’t care enough to keep what he had. The train of thought, once begun, was a runaway. Everywhere, in the wreckage around him, he found evidence to support the same bitter thesis: that he had encountered nothing in his life—no person, no state of mind or body—he wanted sufficiently to suffer even passing discomfort for.

A downward spiral began. He spent three months in a wash of depression and self pity that bordered on the suicidal. But even that solution was denied him by his newfound nihilism. If nothing was worth living for it followed, didn’t it, that there was nothing worth dying for either.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

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

“The flawlessly beautiful were flawlessly happy, weren’t they?”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“When, finally, she did sleep, it was the slumber of a watcher and waiter. Light, and full of sighs.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Sin lágrimas, por favor. Es un desperdicio de buen sufrimiento.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Le stagioni si agognano l’un l’altra, come uomini e donne, in modo da essere guarite dai loro eccessi. La primavera, se si protrae per più di una settimana oltre il suo tempo naturale, comincia a patire l’assenza dell’estate che ponga fine ai giorni della promessa perpetua. L’estate dal suo canto comincia ben presto a invocare qualcosa che plachi la sua calura e il più ubere degli autunni alla lunga si stanca della sua generosità e reclama una rapida, aspra gelata che lo sterilizzi. Persino l’inverno, la più dura delle stagioni, la più implacabile, sogna all’apparire di febbraio la fiamma che presto lo scioglierà. Ogni cosa si stanca con il tempo e comincia a cercare un suo contrario che la salvi da se stessa. Così agosto cedette il posto a settembre e pochi se ne lamentarono.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart

“Gli parve che l'unica soluzione potesse essere la follia, nessuna speranza se non la perdita della speranza.”
― Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart