Cabal Quotes

“The sun rose like a stripper, keeping its glory well covered by cloud till it seemed there'd be no show at all.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Of all the rash and midnight promises made in the name of love, none, Boone now knew, was more certain to be broken than "I'll never leave you.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

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

“The un-people, the anti-tribe, humanity’s sack unpicked and sewn together again with the moon inside.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Her gaze went with her, into a room with walls of frozen earth, and a floor the same, the latter split from corner to corner, and a fissure opened in it from which a flame column rose four or five times the size of a man. There was bitter cold off it rather than heat, and no reassuring flicker in its heart. Instead its innards churned upon themselves, turning over and over some freight of stuff which she failed to recognize at first, but her appalled stare rapidly interpreted. There was a body in the fire, hacked limb from limb, human enough that she recognized it as flesh, but no more than that. Baphomet's doing presumably, some torment visited on a transgressor. Boone said the Baptizer's name even now, and she readied herself for sight of its face. She had it too, but from inside the flame, as the creature there--not dead, but alive, not Midian's subject, but its creator--rolled its head over in the turmoil of flame and looked her way. This was Baphomet. This diced and divided thing. Seeing its face, she screamed. No story or movie screen, no desolation, no bliss, had prepared her for the maker of Midian. Sacred it must be, as anything so extreme must be sacred. A thing beyond things. Beyond love or hatred or their sum, beyond the beautiful or the monstrous or their sum. Beyond, finally, her mind's power to comprehend or catalog.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Born from different parents, they were siblings in death, destroyed by the same hand.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“You want my advice!
Kiss the Devil, eat the worm. -- Jan de Mooy, Another Matter; or, Man Remade”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“So discretion was the by-word. They would take meant only when the hunger became crippling, and only then victims who were unlikely to be missed. They would refrain from infecting others, so as no to advertise their presence. if one was found, no other would risk exposure by going to his aid. Hard laws o live by, but not as hard as the consequences of breaking them. The rest was patience, and they were well used to that. Their liberator would come eventually, if they could only survive the wait. Few had any clue as to the shape he'd come in. But all knew his name. Cabal, he was called. Who Unmade Midian. Their prayers were full of him. On the next wind, let him come. If not now, then tomorrow. They might not have prayed so passionately had they known what a sea change his coming would bring. They might not have prayed at all had the know they prayed to themselves. But these were revelations for a later day. For now, they had simpler concerns. Keeping the children from the roofs at night, the bereaved from crying out too loud, the young in summer from falling in love with the human. It was a life.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Putting down the devil was the Lord’s own sport.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“—when the sun goes out and there’s only night, we’ll live on the earth. It’ll be ours.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Here was a place sacred to the dead, who were not the living ceased, but almost another species, requiring rites and prayers that belonged uniquely to them.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“For now, they had simpler concerns. Keeping the children from the roofs at night, the bereaved from crying out too loud, the young in summer from falling in love with the human.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“He started down the slope towards it, dressed in the blood of his enemy.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Lori had broken that spell of despair, coming to him not begging but demanding he forgive himself.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“No sword shall touch you. Unless it be mine.” — Anonymous, lover’s oath”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Only once did Lori glimpse such an entity, supine on a mattress in the corner of its boudoir. It was naked, corpulent and sexless, its sagging body a motley of dark, oily skin and larval eruptions that seeped phosphorescence, soaking its simple bed.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Forgive yourself,’ Boone said. ‘I did.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“All Darkness was one darkness in the end. Of heart or Heavens, one Darkness.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Lost in the wasteland, Ashbery was found by a light flickering up from between the fractured paving stones. Its beams were bitterly cold, and sticky in a way light had no right to be, adhering to his sleeve and hand before fading away. Intrigued, he tracked its source from one eruption to another, each point brighter than the one before.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“So many masks. Was she the only one who had no secret life, no other self in marrow or mind?”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Among his memories of the whole and the human, sharpest was that of Decker.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“There were no chambers now along the passageway and consequently no lights. There was a glow up ahead, however—fitful and cold, but bright enough to illuminate both the ground she stumbled over, which was bare earth, and the silvery frost on the walls.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Or were they breed who had died from their half-life, caught in the sun, perhaps, or withered by longing?”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“The wind was not invisible. It had a texture, as though it carried a weight of dust, the motes steadily gumming up her eyes and sealing her nose, finding its way into her underwear and up into her body by those routes too.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Of all the rash and midnight promises made in the name of love, none, Boone now knew, was more certain to be broken than “I’ll never leave you”.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“What time didn’t steal from under your nose, circumstance did. It was useless to hope otherwise. Useless to dream that the world somehow meant you good.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“He was no longer innocent. With this slaughter he became the killer Decker had persuaded him he was. In murdering the prophet he made the prophecy true.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“But better to be buried in the rubble than succumb to the Mask. And be flattered, at the end, that Fate had at least offered her a choice of extinctions.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“What was below could remain below no longer.

The Nightbreed were rising.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal

“Nothing’s right .... except what you feel and know.”
― Clive Barker, Cabal