Chiliad Quotes

“We all count the hours. We all look for completion, even if we fear it. We long to be consumed. I long to be consumed.”
― Clive Barker, Chiliad: A Meditation

“The Pantheons made themselves apparent in the blink of an eye; perhaps less. At one instant the planet was a place of faith, doubt, and godlessness, the next there was room for none of these. Who needed faith when the senses confirmed all? As for doubt and godlessness, they were absurdities now that every deity that had ever appeared in human consciousness (and some several hundred thousand who had never made it) had manifested themselves. The Coming was indiscriminate; it made no distinction between great divinities and small. There were vast and transformative powers abroad, deities that brought with them fleets of angelic vehicles and all manner of divine paraphernalia, but there were also threadbare local gods, guardians of painted rocks, spirits of bamboo groves; presences that healed sores and brought lovers, demons who haunted empty roads and forsaken hotels. A world of yearning and need was suddenly a place of surfeit; and the end of mankind began, for there was nothing left invisible, or unknowable, and therefore nothing left to hope for or desire.”
― Clive Barker, Chiliad: A Meditation

“He is not angry now; knives are not angry. He is not tearful now; knives are not tearful. He is simply sharp and keen and inevitable.”
― Clive Barker, Chiliad: A Meditation

“And whatever she suffered, he will suffer so much worse, so much worse. However loudly she cried, and begged him to stop, her murderer will cry out more loudly.”
― Clive Barker, Chiliad: A Meditation

“There is in our natures a calamitous hunger for consummation.”
― Clive Barker, Chiliad: A Meditation

“In my mind the river flows both ways. Forward, to the explanation of things; to a destination which will justify the agonies of travel. And back, back to a time when the river was real, and those who wandered along its banks had little interest in visions.”
― Clive Barker, Chiliad: A Meditation

“It would not have made a good book, I think. It would have been a folly. Its best telling was in these paragraphs: they contain all the ironies a tome would have contained, and waste less ink.”
― Clive Barker, Chiliad: A Meditation

“A world of yearning and need was suddenly a place of surfeit; and the end of mankind began, for there was nothing left invisible, or unknowable, and therefore nothing left to hope for or desire.”
― Clive Barker, Chiliad: A Meditation

“Pleasure is a reward, given to the human system by evolution in return for services rendered to the preservation and increase of the species.”
― Clive Barker, Chiliad: A Meditation