Books of Blood, Volume Two Quotes

“It’s only when you’ve lost someone that you realize the nonsense of that
phrase “It’s a small world”. It isn’t. It’s a vast, devouring world, especially if you’re alone.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volume Two

“She was a sea: and I had to swim in her.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volume Two

“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

“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

“If one has given oneself utterly, watching the beloved sleep can be a vile experience. Perhaps some of you have known that paralysis, staring down at features closed to your enquiry, locked away from you where you can never, ever go, into the other’s mind. As I say, for us who have given ourselves, that is a horror. One knows, in those moments, that one does not exist, except in relation to that face, that personality. Therefore, when that face is closed down, that personality is lost in its own unknowable world, one feels completely without purpose. A planet without a sun, revolving in darkness.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volume Two

“Women had always existed: they had lived, a species to themselves, with the demons. But they had wanted playmates: and together they had made men. What an error, what a cataclysmic miscalculation.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“We cannot believe, we men, that power will ever reside happily in the body of a woman, unless that power is a male child. Not true power. The power must be in male hands, God-given. That’s what our fathers tell us, idiots that they are.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“Her mother had always said that women, being more at peace with themselves than men, needed fewer distractions from their hurts.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“He liked the phrase “mother’s tit.” It said so much, so simply. Momma’s tit had a good deal more power to move these men than her apple pie.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“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

“She was so beautiful, you see. Not in any two-dimensional sense: she wasn’t young, she wasn’t innocent, she didn’t have that pristine symmetry so favored by ad-men and photographers. Her face was plainly that of a woman in her early forties: it had been used to laugh and cry, and usage leaves its marks. But she had a power to transform herself, in the subtlest way, making that face as various as the sky.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“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

“At thirty-four, she'd decided she'd grown out of sex. Bed was for sleep, especially for fat girls.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood Volume 2

“Women had always existed: they had lived, a species to themselves, with the demons. But they had wanted playmates: and together they had made men.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“He was not happier at his mother’s nipple than in that ring of demons.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“Discretion’s the better part of valor,”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

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

“but as his years advanced Lewis had seen less and less purpose in distinguishing between fact and fiction.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2

“We cannot believe, we men, that power will ever reside happily in the body of a woman, unless that power is a male child. Not true power. The power must be in male hands, God-given. That's what our fathers tell us, idiots that they are”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Volume Two

“watching the ice-floes dance together on the black water.”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume 2