Clive Barker · 507 pages
Rating: (21.8K votes)
“Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.”
“There is no delight the equal of dread”
“(...) An amalgam of sexual excess and demonic elegance, as likely to fuck you as tear out your heart.”
“So now, I look at these stories, and almost like a photograph snapped at a party, I find all manner of signs and indications of who I was. Was? Yes, was. I look at these pieces and I don't think the man who wrote them is alive in me anymore. Writing an introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of Weaveworld last year I remarked on much of the same thing: the man who'd written that book was no longer around. He'd died in me, was buried in me. We are our own graveyards; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we're neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present.”
“Does the beef salute the butcher as it throbs to it's knees?”
“This is a forsaken place...I can think of no use for a place like this, except that you could say of it: I saw the heart of nothing, and survived.”
“There was pain without hope of healing. There was life that refused to end, long after the mind had begged the body to cease. And worst, there were dreams come true.”
“There is a thing called the blood feud. All societies have them, even the West Saxons have them, despite their vaunted piety. Kill a member of my family and I shall kill one of yours, and so it goes on, generation after generation or until one family is all dead, and Kjartan had just wished a blood feud on himself. I did not know how, I did not know where, I could not know when, but I would revenge Ragnar. I swore it that night.”
“.. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the 'Momentary' masters of a 'Fraction' of a 'Dot' ”
“A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven.”
“It was all so clear now. Like everything had been lost in darkness, and then the sun came out. Some moments are like that.”
“And what fun is it being a genius if no one appreciates you?”
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