“The sun rose like a stripper, keeping its glory well covered by cloud till it seemed there'd be no show at all.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“Of all the rash and midnight promises made in the name of love, none, Boone now knew, was more certain to be broken than "I'll never leave you.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“I was born alive. Isn’t that punishment enough?”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“So discretion was the by-word. They would take meant only when the hunger became crippling, and only then victims who were unlikely to be missed. They would refrain from infecting others, so as no to advertise their presence. if one was found, no other would risk exposure by going to his aid. Hard laws o live by, but not as hard as the consequences of breaking them. The rest was patience, and they were well used to that. Their liberator would come eventually, if they could only survive the wait. Few had any clue as to the shape he'd come in. But all knew his name. Cabal, he was called. Who Unmade Midian. Their prayers were full of him. On the next wind, let him come. If not now, then tomorrow. They might not have prayed so passionately had they known what a sea change his coming would bring. They might not have prayed at all had the know they prayed to themselves. But these were revelations for a later day. For now, they had simpler concerns. Keeping the children from the roofs at night, the bereaved from crying out too loud, the young in summer from falling in love with the human. It was a life.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“Her gaze went with her, into a room with walls of frozen earth, and a floor the same, the latter split from corner to corner, and a fissure opened in it from which a flame column rose four or five times the size of a man. There was bitter cold off it rather than heat, and no reassuring flicker in its heart. Instead its innards churned upon themselves, turning over and over some freight of stuff which she failed to recognize at first, but her appalled stare rapidly interpreted. There was a body in the fire, hacked limb from limb, human enough that she recognized it as flesh, but no more than that. Baphomet's doing presumably, some torment visited on a transgressor. Boone said the Baptizer's name even now, and she readied herself for sight of its face. She had it too, but from inside the flame, as the creature there--not dead, but alive, not Midian's subject, but its creator--rolled its head over in the turmoil of flame and looked her way. This was Baphomet. This diced and divided thing. Seeing its face, she screamed. No story or movie screen, no desolation, no bliss, had prepared her for the maker of Midian. Sacred it must be, as anything so extreme must be sacred. A thing beyond things. Beyond love or hatred or their sum, beyond the beautiful or the monstrous or their sum. Beyond, finally, her mind's power to comprehend or catalog.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“For now, they had simpler concerns. Keeping the children from the roofs at night, the bereaved from crying out too loud, the young in summer from falling in love with the human.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“Putting down the devil was the Lord’s own sport.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“The un-people, the anti-tribe, humanity’s sack unpicked and sewn together again with the moon inside.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“You want my advice!
Kiss the Devil, eat the worm. -- Jan de Mooy, Another Matter; or, Man Remade”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“Born from different parents, they were siblings in death, destroyed by the same hand.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“—when the sun goes out and there’s only night, we’ll live on the earth. It’ll be ours.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“The wind was not invisible. It had a texture, as though it carried a weight of dust, the motes steadily gumming up her eyes and sealing her nose, finding its way into her underwear and up into her body by those routes too.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“All Darkness was one darkness in the end. Of heart or Heavens, one Darkness.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“Or were they breed who had died from their half-life, caught in the sun, perhaps, or withered by longing?”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“Among his memories of the whole and the human, sharpest was that of Decker.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“There were no chambers now along the passageway and consequently no lights. There was a glow up ahead, however—fitful and cold, but bright enough to illuminate both the ground she stumbled over, which was bare earth, and the silvery frost on the walls.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“It was bad enough that these creatures had children and art; that they might also have vision was too dangerous a thought to entertain.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“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.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“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.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“ignorant of the place it had been and blind to where it was headed.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“So many masks. Was she the only one who had no secret life, no other self in marrow or mind?”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“Here was a place sacred to the dead, who were not the living ceased, but almost another species, requiring rites and prayers that belonged uniquely to them.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“Of all the rash and midnight promises made in the name of love, none, Boone now knew, was more certain to be broken than “I’ll never leave you.” What”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“Decker pulled the mask on. It smelt of his excitement. As soon as he breathed in he got a hard. Not the little sex-hard, but the death-hard; the murder-hard. It sniffed the air for him, even through the thickness of his trousers and underwear. It smelt the victim that ran ahead of him. The Mask didn't care that his prey was female; he got the murder-hard for anyone. In his time he'd had a heat for old men, pissing their pants as they went down in front of him; for girls, sometimes; sometimes women; even children. Ol' Button Face looked with the same cross-threaded eyes on the whole of humanity.”
― Clive Barker, quote from Cabal
“Entry: Barbary Vikings
Where horned Helmets and fur Cloaks; otherwise you could misstake them for Northern Barbarians. They swagger hughly, quarrel hughly, drink hughly and boast hughly.
They thing they like the best is killing people, particulary lots at once. If a Barbary viking goes berserk, he will kill even more freely. Stand clear if one does.
All of them are excelent seamen. Their Boats have square sails and lines of Shields down the sides.
Quite often, the Managment employs them as Pirates because they are good at raping and looting and burning.
But on some Tours they appears as allies of a rather wilful kind, and will take Tourist for a sail.
At home, which are somewhere quite northerly, they have a King, who is Good and to whom they are viciously loyal, and they womenfolk whom you scarly se at all because they are all at home berring warrios. Barbary vikings are even maler then Anglo-Saxoon cossacks.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, quote from The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
“an old man with no destiny with our never knowing who he was, or what he was like, or even if he was only a figment of the imagination, a comic tyrant who never knew where the reverse side was and where the right of this life which we loved with an insatiable passion that you never dared even to imagine out of the fear of knowing what we knew only too well that it was arduous and ephemeral but there wasn't any other, general, because we knew who we were while he was left never knowing it forever with the soft whistle of his rupture of a dead old man cut off at the roots by the slash of death, flying through the dark sound of the last frozen leaves of his autumn toward the homeland of shadows of the truth of oblivion, clinging to his fear of the rotting cloth of death's hooded cassock and alien to the clamor of the frantic crowds who took to the streets singing hymns of joy at the jubilant news of his death and alien forevermore to the music of liberation and the rockets of jubilation and the bells of glory that announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from The Autumn of the Patriarch
“I should take a photo.'
'No. Just remember it, and us in it.”
― Ali Shaw, quote from The Girl With Glass Feet
“The outward scars aren’t what determine what a man will become. It’s the inward scars that can keep a man from living the life God intended.”
― Tamera Alexander, quote from Rekindled
“People sometimes find Buddhism pessimistic, saying there is too much talk about death. It’s essential to understand that Buddhists don’t contemplate death because they are morbid or depressed; they focus on death, mortality, and human frailty as a means of better understanding and appreciating life.”
― Lama Surya Das, quote from Awakening the Buddha Within
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