Top 300 Clive Barker Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “Having a routine that bordered on stagnancy had its benefits.”

— Clive Barker

253. “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

254. “Somebody’s voice rose in prayer, another simply sobbed. What grief was this? Not his passing, surely. He was too minor to earn such lamentation.”

— Clive Barker

255. “Dreams are doorways... If we but have the courage to step over the threshold.”

— Clive Barker

256. “Like a prisoner without hope of parole she took what entertainment she could find to ease the passage of time.”

— Clive Barker

257. “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

258. “Hayal edilen asla yitirilmez.”

— Clive Barker

259. “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

260. “I used to live in Los Angeles,” Norma said. “Off a winding road called Coldheart Canyon.”

— Clive Barker

261. “You’ve got blood on your hands, and you smell of coitus.”

— Clive Barker

262. “Brooding only looks good in the movies.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

264. “The stench of disinfectant could not entirely mask the odor of human pain.”

— Clive Barker

265. “If nothing was worth living for it followed, didn’t it, that there was nothing worth dying for either.”

— Clive Barker

266. “The presence of phantoms – everywhere – their faces, ripe with need and unspent passion, trailing their hunger like pollen from flowers that were past their hour but refused to wither and disappear.”

— Clive Barker

267. “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

268. “They looked, to all intents and purposes, like living men and women. But then wasn’t that the trick of their craft? To imitate life so well the illusion was indistinguishable from the real thing?”

— Clive Barker

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

272. “But the strongest scent was also the oldest – it was the perfume of his transgressions. There were other smells, too, some of which she could name – incense, books, sweat – and far, far more that she had no name for.”

— Clive Barker

273. “Do unto others, boy, before they do unto you.”

— Clive Barker

274. “Nothing is fixed. In and out the shuttle goes fact and fiction, mind and matter, woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden amongst them is a filigree which will with time become a world.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

276. “Why? What is his intention? Have you at least discovered that?” “The same as ours, we think,” Felixson said. “The getting and keeping of power. He hasn’t just taken our treaties, scrolls, and grimoires. He’s cleared out all the vestments, all the talismans, all the amulets – ” “Hush,” Ragowski said suddenly. “Listen.” There was a silence among them for a moment, and then a funereal bell chimed softly in the distance. “Oh Christ,” Lili said. “It’s his bell.” The dead man laughed. “He’s found you.”

— Clive Barker

277. “With Floyd we had three hundred and ninety-eight years between us. All that bitter experience,” he said, “and not one of us wise.”

— Clive Barker

278. “A feeling of intense loss overwhelmed him for a moment as he thought of his once-charmed life – of love, and magic, and friends, all of it, and all of them, dead.”

— Clive Barker

279. “Heaven will provide. Or else it won’t, and I’ll go hungry.”

— Clive Barker

280. “This, no doubt, was the call 33 had heard. Bored with his balanced diet of maize and maple peas, tired of the pecking order of the loft and the predictability of each day – the bird had wanted out; wanted up and away. A day of high life; of food that had to be chased a little, and tasted all the better for that; of the companionship of wild things. All this went through Cal’s head, in a vague sort of way, while he watched the circling flocks.”

— Clive Barker

281. “If you were alone on earth, what would you know? What the mirror told you, that’s all. The rest would be myth and conjecture.”

— Clive Barker

282. “Not a whisper of flatulence would dare this man’s bowels.”

— Clive Barker

283. “He took a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped hard at his mouth, back and forth, as though a residue of guilt clung there and he was afraid it would give him away.”

— Clive Barker

284. “Ricky tasted something he hadn’t experienced since childhood: the panic of losing the hand of a guardian. In this case the lost parent was his sanity. Somewhere.”

— Clive Barker

285. “But then sanity was a movable feast, wasn’t it? One man’s madness might be another’s politics.”

— Clive Barker

286. “Who in their right minds would trust someone who made a profession out of poking around in sick people?”

— Clive Barker

287. “Once you conceded defeat, life was a feather bed. In.”

— Clive Barker

288. “He’d never seen such a look on any human face: such a wilderness of innocent malice. A.”

— Clive Barker

289. “Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise.”

— Clive Barker

290. “Every man is his own Mephistopheles, don’t you think? If I hadn’t come along you’d have made a bargain with some other power. And you would have had your fortune, and your women, and your strawberries. All those torments I’ve made you suffer.”

— Clive Barker

291. “That’s a whole other story.’ ‘Is it?’ Gentle replied. ‘Or is it all one?”

— Clive Barker

292. “He looked too drained to argue, his stare somehow unfinished, as though it had a place it wanted to rest but couldn’t find.”

— Clive Barker

293. “Experience was made up of endless ambiguities – of motive, of feeling, of cause and effect – and if he was to win under such circumstances, he had to understand how those ambiguities worked.”

— Clive Barker

294. “She got up and crossed to the window. Like father like daughter, he thought: window freaks, both of them.”

— Clive Barker

295. “Outside, somewhere near, the world would soon be waking. He had watched it wake from the window of this very room, day after day, stirring itself to another round of fruitless pursuits, and he’d known, known, that there was nothing left out there to excite him.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

297. “This will not come again. Nor this. Nor this...”

— Clive Barker

298. “Yes, he knew his face was finely made, his forehead broad, his gaze haunting, his lips sculpted so that even a sneer looked fetching on them, but he needed a living mirror to tell him so.”

— Clive Barker

299. “Dead isn’t bad,” Narcisse said. “It isn’t even that different.”

— Clive Barker

300. “He started down the slope towards it, dressed in the blood of his enemy.”

— Clive Barker