Top 300 Clive Barker Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Forgive yourself,’ Boone said. ‘I did.”

— Clive Barker

302. “Of such divine neglect was atheism made; belief could not be rekindled now, however profound his terror. Thoughts.”

— Clive Barker

303. “What marked this place as another Dominion was the people in the streets outside, some human, many not, all retreating from the wind or the commotions it carried.”

— Clive Barker

304. “The true Wonderland was not like that, he knew. It was as much shadow as sunlight, and its mysteries could only be unveiled when your wits were about used up and your mind close to cracking.”

— Clive Barker

305. “Extinct,” Steep murmured. “Yes.” He smiled. “Extinct, extinct, extinct.” It was like a mantra:.”

— Clive Barker

306. “I wanted to be gone forever from being and knowing, which are the pieces of.”

— Clive Barker

307. “He offered her a grin designed for better teeth.”

— Clive Barker

308. “Every moment she wasted saying No to what she KNEW, was a moment lost to comprehension. That her worldview couldn’t contain such a mystery without shattering was its liability, and a problem for another day.”

— Clive Barker

309. “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

310. “I lived, I suppose, in a cell of my own creation, while outside its walls lay a landscape of unparalleled richness. But I could not bear to venture there. In my self-delusion I thought I was a minor king, and I didn’t want to step beyond the bounds of what I knew for fear I lost my dominion.”

— Clive Barker

311. “But he’d brought new wisdom from the high places. He knew now that things forgotten might be recalled; things lost, found again.”

— Clive Barker

312. “When it was all done, Suzanna found her voice, thanking both the grave diggers and their mothers. “After all that digging,” said the eldest of the girls, “I just hope he grows.” “He will,” said her mother, with no trace of indulgence. “They always do.” On.”

— Clive Barker

313. “Was that what made him a European? To want to have his story told once more, passed down the line to another eager listener who would, in his time, disregard its lesson and repeat his own suffering? Ah, how he loved tradition.”

— Clive Barker

314. “He had certainly set his eyes on more voluptuous creatures, but something about her lack of glamour engaged him. Such women were in his experience often more entertaining company than beauties like Julia. They could be flattered or bullied into acts the beauties would never countenance and be grateful for the attention.”

— Clive Barker

315. “Every man is his own Mephistopheles, don’t you think?”

— Clive Barker

316. “Why do boys always love talking about ghosts and murders and hangings?’ ‘Because it’s exciting,’ Wendell said.”

— Clive Barker

317. “He told me he loved me, Clem.’ Oh Lord.’ ‘And I believed him.’ ‘How many dozens of men have told you that?’ ‘Yes, but he was different ‘Famous last words.”

— Clive Barker

318. “Nothing’s right... except what you feel and know.”

— Clive Barker

319. “He was not happier at his mother’s nipple than in that ring of demons.”

— Clive Barker

320. “Some die too soon. Most live too long.”

— Clive Barker

321. “She was indeed tired, as she’d claimed, but it wasn’t the cooking that exhausted her. It was the effort of suppressing her contempt for he damn fools who were gathered in the lounge below. She’d called them friends once, these half-wits, with their poor jokes and poorer pretensions.”

— Clive Barker

322. “You know, as a child I thought somebody came and took the world away in the night and then came back and unrolled it all again the following morning.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

324. “You won’t simply witness what is going to unfold in Hell from this point outward; you will make a testament of it, wherein my acts and my philosophies will be recounted in full detail. They will be my Gospels, and I will forbid you nothing in their chapters and verses, as long as it is observed truth, however far from my ideal of myself I may fall.”

— Clive Barker

325. “It’d just be another opinion,” Maxine said, poking at the fire with the stick she’d picked up. “People would go on believing their favorite versions.” “You think?” “For sure. You can’t change people’s opinion about stuff like that. It’s embedded. They believe what they believe.”

— Clive Barker

326. “No passion, only sudden lust, and just as sudden indifference.”

— Clive Barker

327. “Revulsion gave heat to his heals.”

— Clive Barker

328. “I feel things other people don’t. I don’t think it’s particularly clever of me, or anything like that. I just do it.”

— Clive Barker

329. “Maybe if they didn’t tell you the stories... they’d actually go out and do it.”

— Clive Barker

330. “A skin was nothing. Pigs had skins; snakes had skins. They were knitted of dead cells, shed and grown and shed again. But a name? That was a spell, which summoned memories.”

— Clive Barker

331. “She’d taken the harlot century she’d been born into for granted, knowing no other, but now-seeing it with his eyes, hearing it with his ears-she understood it afresh; saw just how desperate it was to please, yet how dispossessed of pleasure; how crude, even as it claimed sophistication; and, despite it’s zeal to spellbind, how utterly unenchanting.”

— Clive Barker

332. “Nobody’s allowed to come and mourn, you see. Out of sight, out of mind: that’s the idea. Of course, that’s not the way it works, is it? People forget prime ministers, but they remember murderers.”

— Clive Barker

333. “Besides, he guessed she wouldn’t have thanked him for delaying his purchase. She needed dope more than she needed him.”

— Clive Barker

334. “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

335. “It was what his mother would have done in the circumstances. Boiled some fresh water, warmed the pot and counted out the spoonfuls of tea. Setting domestic order against the chaos, in the hope of winning some temporary reprieve from the vale of tears.”

— Clive Barker

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

— Clive Barker

337. “Imagination was true power: it worked transformations wealth and influence never could.”

— Clive Barker

338. “Nobody ever just passed through; experience always left its mark.”

— Clive Barker

339. “His eyelids closed – buckled, really – the bones in his face so fragile they shattered under the weight of his very lids as he dropped to the threshold of existence. His last breath had already left him. And as he fell, life did the same.”

— Clive Barker

340. “You leave marks on people, Gentle. That’s a responsibility you can’t just shrug off.”

— Clive Barker

341. “Houses weren’t haunted, only human minds.”

— Clive Barker

342. “Nor in prayer either. He had told Billy the truth, about his giving up God when his prayers for his father’s life had gone unanswered. Of such divine neglect was aetheism made; belief could not be rekindled now, however profound his terror.”

— Clive Barker

343. “Nothing would take him, he was a barbarian with the manners of a gentleman. Neither.”

— Clive Barker

344. “As Harry marveled, the Cenobite continued his brutal effort of making new adjustments to his own flesh so as to fit the Devil’s suit: first a slice off his other hip, down to the red meat; then up to his arms, slicing away the flesh at the back of his triceps; and passing the knife from left hand to right and back again, cutting effortlessly with either. The area around his feet looked like the floor of a butcher’s store. Cobs and slices of fatty meat were scattered everywhere.”

— Clive Barker

345. “There was a primitive power in naming someone. It gave you a handle on a person.”

— Clive Barker

346. “I was watching the power at work behind the face of the world. What I had always assumed to be a calamitous unseen war, waged in sky and rock and on occasion invading your human world, was not a bloody battle, with legions slaughtering one another; it was this endless fish-market bartering.”

— Clive Barker