Top 300 Clive Barker Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “His body and his mind went about their different businesses. The former, freed from conscious instruction, breathed, rolled, sweated, and digested. The latter went dreaming.”

— Clive Barker

202. “Maybe the man had taken the wrong turning, but at least he’d travelled some extraordinary roads.”

— Clive Barker

203. “We’re living; but we impersonate the dead better than the dead themselves.”

— Clive Barker

204. “Sometimes, of course, the war required that he be cruel, but what cause worth fighting for did not require cruelty of its champions once in a while?”

— Clive Barker

205. “All Darkness was one darkness in the end. Of heart or Heavens, one Darkness.”

— Clive Barker

206. “Indifference was the best remedy. Once you conceded defeat, life was a feather bed.”

— Clive Barker

207. “A sweet slip of a girl like you, why should you have to know anything about the sorrow of the world? You just believe me when I tell you... there’s no way to live your life to the full and not have a reason to shed a tear now and again. It’s not a bad feeling, child. That’s what a lament does. It makes you feel happy to be sad, in a strange way. D’you see?”

— Clive Barker

208. “Nothing, I had come to believe by the end, was more illusory than the idea of ending.”

— Clive Barker

209. “War is but a continuation of diplomacy by alternate means.”

— Clive Barker

210. “I don’t like to make a distinction between the writer and the painter, finally, because I do both things anyway. Everybody’s dreaming and trying to put down their dreams in the way that their hand knows best. I feel as much a unity, as much comradeship, with painters as I do writers .”

— Clive Barker

211. “Sometimes nature is even crueller than politics.”

— Clive Barker

212. “Stories had a way of doing that, in Grillo’s experience. It was his belief that nothing, but nothing, could stay secret, however powerful the forces with interests vested in silence. Conspirators might conspire and thugs attempt to gag but the truth, or an approximation of same, would show itself sooner or later, very often in the unlikeliest form. It was seldom hard facts that revealed the life behind the life. It was rumour, graffiti, strip cartoons and love songs.”

— Clive Barker

213. “My skull was a face that concealed scorpions.”

— Clive Barker

214. “No. No, I’m not.” Then she said: “I’m somebody else. I just don’t know who that somebody else is yet.” “Well that’s what journeys are for,” Diamanda Murkitt said.”

— Clive Barker

215. “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

216. “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

217. “For a writer, and particularly a writer of my genre, which is the fantastical, I think that it’s to my advantage to feel remote from and disconnected from the world of deal making.”

— Clive Barker

218. “Whatever capacity she possesses to supernaturally beguile a human soul – and she possesses many – she liked his clear-sightedness too well, to blind him that way.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

220. “He loved getting crucified at the summer and winter solstices,” Norma told Harry. Norma listened while the invisible presence added something to this. “He says you should try it, Harry. A crucifixion and a good blow job. Heaven on Earth.”

— Clive Barker

221. “This was the substance of every moment, she realized: the body – never certain if the next lungful would be its last – hovering for a tiny time between cessation and continuance. And in that space out of time, between a breath expelled and another drawn, the miraculous was easy, because neither flesh nor reason has laid their edicts there.”

— Clive Barker

222. “Flesh is a trap, and magic sets us free.”

— Clive Barker

223. “They knew a lot, the dead. How many times had she said to Harry they were the world’s greatest untapped resource? It was true. All they’d seen, all they’d suffered, all they’d triumphed over – lost to a world in need of wisdom. And why? Because at a certain point in the evolution of the species a profound superstition was sewn into the human heart that the dead were to be considered sources of terror rather than enlightenment.”

— Clive Barker

224. “When, finally, she did sleep, it was the slumber of a watcher and waiter. Light, and full of sighs.”

— Clive Barker

225. “The way she saw it, she was lucky. She wasn’t really blind – she just saw a different world from most other folks, and that put her in a unique position to do some good in the world.”

— Clive Barker

226. “Then, having finished with his gesture of remorse, he sat down, like any decent man who has been deeply wronged, and planned murder.”

— Clive Barker

227. “You still love her, don’t you?” Pie said, once they were out and walking. “Of course I love her,” Estabrook said. “That’s why I want her dead.” “There’s no resurrection, Mr. Estabrook. Not for you, at least.” “It’s not me who’s dying,” he said. “I think it is,” came the.”

— Clive Barker

228. “Winning is beauty. It is like life itself.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

230. “She’s got powers,” said de Bono, taking off his spectacles and surveying the terrain ahead. “Most women have, of course.”

— Clive Barker

231. “Sanity is a movable feast. One man’s madness is another’s politics.”

— Clive Barker

232. “He spent three months in a wash of depression and self-pity that bordered the suicidal. But even that solution was denied him by his new found nihilism. If nothing was worth living for it followed, didn’t it, that there was nothing worth dying for either.”

— Clive Barker

233. “Hate remembered though; hate remembered long after love had forgotten.”

— Clive Barker

234. “Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, to save it from itself.”

— Clive Barker

235. “I thought I’d gone to the limits,′ Frank explains. ‘I hadn’t. The Cenobites gave me an experience beyond limits. Pain and pleasure, indivisible... Some things have to be endured. Take it from me. And that’s what makes the pleasures so sweet.”

— Clive Barker

236. “I used to tell myself that,” he said. “Day in, day out. Used to try and dream the agonies away. But you can’t. Take it from me. You can’t. They have to be endured.”

— Clive Barker

237. “I’ll love you until the death of love.”

— Clive Barker

238. “What are you trying to prove? Do you think if you kill enough people in the worst ways imaginable they’ll give you a name like the Madman, or the Butcher? It doesn’t matter how many abhorrent tortures you devise. You’ll always be the Pinhead.”

— Clive Barker

239. “Magic is the first and last religion of the world. It has the power to make us whole.”

— Clive Barker

240. “Sounds to me like those nails are touching too much gray matter.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

242. “Sure, work could be a pain in the ass, but it was purpose, and what was a life, any life, his life, without purpose?”

— Clive Barker

243. “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

244. “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

245. “The Deluge wasn’t a wave, was it? It was blind men with axes; it was the great on their knees begging not to die at the hands of idiots; it was the itch of the irrational grown to an epidemic.”

— Clive Barker

246. “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 thereshold that, like all theresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished.”

— Clive Barker

247. “Whatever you do, don’t look back.”

— Clive Barker

248. “But when I look out at it I think, well, it’s going to take us all one of these days, whoever we are: mad bastards, lovers, drunkards, it’s not going to pick and choose. We’ll all go to nothing sooner or later. And you know, maybe it’s my age, but that doesn’t worry me any longer. We all have our time, and when it’s over, it’s over.”

— Clive Barker

249. “The Hell Priest had begun to utter what sounded like a cross between a chant and an equation: numbers and words intertwined.”

— Clive Barker

250. “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