Quotes from Clive Barker

The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive. Here he was, buried in the belly of that smothering month, wondering if he would ever find his way out through the cold coils that lay between here and Easter.

We are all our own graveyards I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were.

You only saw the darkness, Tammy. There was another side to her. I think there always is, don't you? There's always some light in the darkness, somewhere.

Sometimes nature is even crueller than politics.

Can you hear me, Todd? There's an ambulance on its way." For a moment his eyes opened a little wider, and he seemed to be making an effort to concentrate on the face in front of him. "It's Maxine," she said. "Remember me?

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.

What I do know is that I have never found clowns remotely funny. I am not alone in this, I think. More people find clowns disturbing or distressing rather than raucously amusing. Is it that the nature of human existence has changed so radically in the last century or so that what was funny to our grandparents and great-grandparents is now tragic or terrifying?

Didn't open the box? What was it last time? Didn't know what it was? And yet we do keep finding each other, don't we? - Cenobite

She's got powers," said de Bono, taking off his spectacles and surveying the terrain ahead. "Most women have, of course.

Flesh is a trap, and magic sets us free.

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.

Be strong, little mother," she said to Melissa. "I know you can be." "Yes?" Melissa said a little doubtfully.

You're right, of course. I haven't come this far to deliver us into oblivion. I have such sights to show you. Soon, you will have answers to questions you have never even dared to ask.

And in time it will be as though men had never come to this perfect corner of the world—never called it paradise on earth, never despoiled it with their dream factories; and in the golden hush of the afternoon all that will be heard will be the flittering of dragonflies, and the murmur of hummingbirds as they pass from bower to bower, looking for a place to sup sweetness.

This will not come again. Nor this. Nor this....

The dead have highways. Clive Barker

though she hurried him on, he dawdled, his head back, squinting at the stars. There were no revelations to be had there. Just pinpricks of light in a plain heaven. But he saw for the first time how fine that was. That in a world too full of loss and rage they be remote: the minimum of glory. As she led him across the lightless ground, time and again he could not prevent his gaze from straying skyward.

They will say your doubts shed innocent blood. But I say - what's blood for, if not for shedding?

Dream! Forge yourself and rise Out of your mind and into others. Men, be women. Fish, be flies. Girls, take beards. Sons, be your mothers. The future of the world now lies In coral wombs behind our eyes.

Here are the stories written on the Book of Blood. They are a map of that dark highway that leads out of life towards unknown destinations. Few will have to take it, most will go on peacefully along lamplit streets, ushered out of living with prayers and caresses. But for a few, a chosen few, the horrors will come, skipping to fetch them off to the highway of the damned...

Women had always existed: they had lived, a species to themselves, with the demons. But they had wanted playmates: and together they had made men. What an error, what a cataclysmic miscalculation.

In his perversity, or his genius, or both

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.

she slipped away unseen, like a shadow's shadow.