Sacrament Quotes

“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

“Life was not a reversible commodity. Things passed away, never to return: species, hopes, years.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“To every hour, its mystery. At dawn, the riddles of life and light. At noon, the conundrums of solidity. At three, in the hum and heat of the day, a phantom moon, already high. At dusk, memory. And at midnight? Oh, then the enigma of time itself; of a day that will never come again passing into history while we sleep.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“We made our choice, he said. We hunted for them, we guarded their brats. God knows, we helped them make a civilization, didn't we? And why?
I said I didn't know; it was beyond me. Because, he said, we thought they knew how to take care of things. How to keep the world full of meat and flowers.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“There was little comfort, this voice inside him said, in discovering a mystery at the wellspring of his life so banal his unremarkable mind could readily fathom it. Better, perhaps, to die in doubt, knowing there was some revelation still unfound, than to pursue and possess such a wretched certainty.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“He lay with a pack of panting dogs on a hill overlooking plains where antelope grazed. He marched with ants, and labored in the rigors of the nest, filing eggs. He danced the mating dance of the bower bird, and slept on a warm rock with his lizard kin. He was a cloud. He was the shadow of a cloud. He was the moon that cast the shadow of a cloud. He was a blind fish; he was a shoal; he was a whale; he was the sea. He was the lord of all he surveyed. He was a worm in the dung of a kite. He did not grieve, knowing his life was a day long, or an hour. He did not wonder who made him. He did not wish to be other. He did not pray. He did not hope. He only was, and was, and was, and that was the joy of it.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“This will not come again. Nor this. Nor this....”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“And in that he shared a common history with most of the men who wandered Folsom and Polk and Market this late afternoon. Men whose mothers and fathers - however loving, however liberal - would never understand them the way they understood their straight children, because these gay sons were genetic cul-de-sacs. Men who would be obliged to make their own families: out of friends, out of lovers, out of divas. Men who were self-invented, for better or worse, makers of styles and mythologies which they constantly cast off with the impatience of souls who would never find a description that quite fitted. If there was a sadness in this there was also a kind of unholy glee.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“Living and dying we feed the fire,” Steep said softly. “That is the melancholy truth of things.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“To every hour, its mystery. At dawn, the riddles of life and light. At noon, the conundrums of solidity. At three, in the hum and heat of the day, a phantom moon, already high. At dusk, memory. And at midnight? Oh, then the enigma of time itself; of a day that will never come again passing into history while we sleep. It”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“We're not going anywhere," Will said with unshakeable conviction, "because we don't come from anywhere. We're spontaneous events. We just appear in the middle of families. And we'll keep appearing. Even if the plague killed every homosexual on the planet, it wouldn't be extinction, because there's queer babies being born every minute. It's like magic." He grinned at the notion. "You know, that's exactly what it is. It's magic.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“While we may admire Will Rabjohns’s consistency of vision, the Time critic had written of “Feeding the Fire,” his accounts of the way humanity brutalizes and destroys natural phenomena become in turn brutal and destructive to those very sensibilities it wishes to arouse to pity or action. The viewer gives up hope in the face of his reports. We watch the extinction with despairing hearts. Well, Mr. Rabjohns, we have dutifully despaired. What now?”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“We deal daily with the squalid facts of our animality, Hugo had written, putting (illegible) a process of self-censorship so engrained we can no longer see it at work. We do not examine the excrement in the bowl or the phlegm in the handkerchief for moral or ethical (he had first written spiritual in place of ethical, but struck it out) indica-tors. There followed a paragraph that he had excised completely, cross-hatching it in his fervor to erase it. When the text picked up again, it was clearer, but still problematic:
Tears, we may allow, carry a measure of emotional significance. In certain (illegible) sweat may be... (illegible) But as scientific methodologies become increasingly sophisticated their tools charting and (calibrating, was it, or calculating-one of the two the nuances of the phenomenal world with an accuracy that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, we are obliged to reconfigure our assumptions. Chemical signifiers— the sap that oozes from our flesh and organs in response to emotional activity-may be found in all our waste products.

Emotion, in other words, resides in the most despised matter in our local parameters, and it will soon be within the realm of instrument sensitivity that the precise emotional source of these signifiers may be discovered.

In short, we will be able to recognize a quality of mass that carries traces of envy; a sample of sweat containing evidence of our rage; a portion of excrement that may be dubbed loving.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“The less alive you were the better chance you had at living. There was probably a lesson in there somewhere, though it was a bitter one. Live like a stone and death might pass you by.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“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

“Extinct,” Steep murmured. “Yes.” He smiled. “Extinct, extinct, extinct.” It was like a mantra:”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“I can guess what you think about her, and I’d probably be thinking the same thing if I was standing where you are. But I’m not. I’m here. You’re there. It’s fucking miles, Will.” He drew a short, almost panicked breath. “I’m dying. And I don’t like it. I’m not at peace, I’m not reconciled—” He turned to claim the joint back from Will. “I’m not . . . finished with being here. Not. Remotely. Finished.”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“The winds mourn and whine was wiser than any psalm, prayer, or profession of love he’d ever heard. But”
― Clive Barker, Sacrament

“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