Clive Barker Quotes

Finally there is nothing here for death to take away.

We die, and we do not die.

The body is not important. It is made of dust; it is made of ashes. It is food for the worms. The winds and the waters dissolve it and scatter it to the four corners of the earth. In the end, what we care most for only lasts a brief lifetime, and then there is eternity. Time forever. Millions of worlds are born, evolve, and pass away into nebulous, unmeasured skies; and there is still eternity. Time always. The body becomes dust and trees and exploding fire, it becomes gaseous and disappears, and still there is eternity. Silent, unopposed, brooding, forever.

Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.

I remember my youth... the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men.

We die only once, and for such a long time.

If we don't know life, how can we know death?

I like thinking about the fragility of the human flesh and our bodies - our decay and eventual death.

Death is a false fear. When it is here, you won't be. When it's not, you are here.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.

Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.

Confront a corpse at least once. The absolute absence of life is the most disturbing and challenging confrontation you will ever have.

I think writing, or any form of art-making, is a way to prepare for not being here. Not that we can. No amount of preparing can really ready us, in a meaningful way, for the great void that awaits us all.

I would rather be ashes than dust.

You live you die and death not ends it.

If death disappears there will be no mystery in life. That's why a dead thing has no mystery in it, a corpse has no mystery in it, because it cannot die anymore. You think it has no mystery because life has disappeared? No, it has no mystery because now it cannot die anymore. Death has disappeared, and with death automatically life disappears. Life is only one of the ways of death's expression.

If everything that ever lived is dead, and everything alive is gonna die...where does the sacred part come in?

If we were doomed to live forever, we would scarcely be aware of the beauty around us.

To be immortal and then die

In the ordinary, everyday understandings of the words involved, to say that someone survived death is to contradict yourself; while to assert that all of us live forever is to assert a manifest falsehood, the flat contrary of a universally known truth: namely, the truth that all human beings are mortal. For when, after some disaster, the 'dead' and the 'survivors' have both been listed, what logical space remains for a third category?

But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found, Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long preserv'd virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust. The grave's a fine and private place, But none I think do there embrace.

The last to be overcome is death, and the knowledge of life is the knowledge of death.

As you were, I was. As I am, you will be.

No matter what you do this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world.