Clive Barker

Why'd you want to sing about sad things?" Candy had asked him. "Because any fool can be happy," he'd said to her. "It takes a man with real heart" —he'd made a fist and laid it against his chest— "to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

‎"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.

It was as though in these last minutes together - when they had so much to say - they could say nothing of the least significance, for fear it open the floodgates.

The moon had risen behind him, the color of a shark's underbelly. It lit the ruined walls, and the skin of his arms and hands, with its sickly light, making him long for a mirror in which to study his face. Surely he'd be able to see the bones beneath the meat; the skull gleaming the way his teeth gleamed when he smiled. After all, wasn't that what a smile said? Hello, world, this is the way I'll look when the wet parts are rotted.

At best you can hold death at bay, you can pretend it isn't there; but to deny it totally is a sickness. And I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems, and, perversely perhaps, to enjoy a vicarious confrontation with them.

Study nothing except in the knowledge that you already knew it. Worship nothing except in adoration of your true self. And fear nothing except in the certainty that you are your enemy's begetter and its only hope of healing.

So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.

Flesh could not keep its glamour, nor eyes their sheen. They would go to nothing soon. But monsters are forever.

I was cured in my new infamy of all the tired wisdom of age. I would never weary into that tired state again - -I swore to myself, I would always be this raw, wet child hereafter.

There’s no conscious thing on the face of the world that doesn’t know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat.

Well, here he was. They could save each other, the way the poets promised lovers should. 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 threshold that, like all thresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished. Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa. And he knew it well enough to call it home.