457 Quotes by Clive Barker

Richard Christian Matheson is a master of compression. He knows how to catch a moment in words and convey it straight to the reader’s heart.

I will treat you with my knife the way you’ve treated my pages with your merciless eyes. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards.

Putting down the devil was the Lord’s own sport.

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.

Her skin was flawless and always cool, always pale; her body was long, like her hair, like her fingers, like her laughter; and her eyes, oh, her eyes, had every season of leaf in them: the twin greens of spring and high summer, the golds of autumn, and, in her rages, black midwinter rot.

And with that comprehension, so unlike the simplifications she’d been ruled by hitherto, she became even more certain that the carpet they carried was a last hope, while he – whose home the Weave contained – seemed increasingly indifferent to its fate, living in the moment and for the moment, touched scarcely at all by hope or regret.

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.

Who can call a man dead whose words still hush and whose sentiments move?

Fear gripped Harry, like some old dope-pusher promising a terrible high.