Quotes from Clive Barker

I was born alive. Isn't that punishment enough?

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.

You can plan to be brave - it's even better if you just try to be brave.

And this story, having no beginning, will have no end.

I dreamed a limitless book, A book unbound, Its leaves scattered in fantastic abundance. On every line there was a new horizon drawn, New heavens supposed; New states, new souls. One of those souls, Dozing through some imagined afternoon, Dreamed these words. And needing a hand to set them down, Made mine.

Journey to the end of day, Come the fire-fly, Come the moon; Say a prayer for God's good grace And sleep with lore upon your face.

Behind their eyes the hope was sickening and in many, dead. They lived from event to event with a subtle terror of the gap between, filling up their lives with distractions to avoid the emptiness where curiosity should have been.

To you who have never died, may I say: Welcome to the world!

There is no delight the equal of dread

Of course it's the apparently tranquil periods that deceive us. Though our instruments or our senses or our wits may not be able to see the processes that are leading toward these clusters of events, they're happening. The star, the wheel, the butterfly—all are in a subtle state of unrest, waiting for the moment when some invisible mechanism signals that the time has come. Then the star explodes; the wheel makes poor men rich; the butterfly mates and dies.

Your flesh is killing your spirit. You have forsaken yourself.

You are my beauty, my body, perfected. All I was drained off into you. When you left, my health went with you - leaving a moral morbidity I smell in my sleep. The acts I committed for the love of you. Acts I can never forget. I crawled into the bellies of the dead to fish out a little life... I have an appetite for it now. I have an unrelenting lust for death.

Let the void come, and bring an end to the tyranny of hope.

Magic is the first and last religion of the world. It has the power to make us whole, to open our eyes to the Dominions and return us to ourselves. Everything that isn't us is also ourselves. We're joined to everything that was, is and will be. From one end of the Imajica to another. From the tiniest mote dancing over this flame to the Godhead Itself.

My feet are killing me. I knew somebody who had feet like that. They'd walk all over him. Archie Kashanian was his name. He used to wake up with footprints all over his chest, all over his face. It was the death of him, finally.

There must still be room for the falling note, of course. Even in an undying world there are times when beauty passes from sight, or love passes from the heart, and we feel the sorrow of partition.

An amalgam of sexual excess and demonic elegance, as likely to fuck you as tear out your heart.

Midian is where the monsters go.

Living in Hell kept him aware of the possibility of Heaven, and he'd never felt more alive.

Leavening the flat bread of what we know, with the yeast of what we dream may come to pass.

We cry for ourselves, don't we? Not for the dead. The dead are past caring.

I think babies cry when they're born because they're born with the knowledge of all the terrible shit that's gonna happen to them. That's why I never had kids. Every life is a death sentence. We just forget it later in life, like dreams we lose the second we wake up. Whether we worry about it or not, the shit's still going to fly. The important thing is we're here. At least for now.

My father used to say: Every bird is one bird, and every book is one book, and every bird and every book is one thing too, under the words and the feathers. He finished with a flourish, as though the meaning of this was self-evident.

Sooner or later even the most ambitious glutton must crawl away and seek the solace of the vomitorium.