Clive Barker Quotes

The passage of time is a continuing thing. At 18, you're going to live forever, and you are definitely not at 52, so that is a recurring topic. I still think it's the main stuff.

The nearer people approach old age the closer they return to a semblance of childhood, until the time comes for them to depart this life, again like children, neither tired of living nor aware of death.

At twenty a man is a peacock, at thirty a lion, at forty a camel, at fifty a serpent, at sixty a dog, at seventy an ape, at eighty a nothing at all.

You get to a certain point in your life where you get closer to the end of your life than the beginning, and it colors your life, in a way.

Death is not a word to fear, any more than birth is.

The four stages of man are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence.

When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.

The minute you're born, you're getting older.

What's a man's age? He must hurry more, that's all; Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold.

Every human being is under construction from conception to death.

I was 24 yesterday. Suddenly you wake up, and you get on the elevator, and there's a mirror there. And you look in the mirror, and you're an old man.

Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.

Dogs are a really amazing eye opener for us humans because their lives are compressed into such a short period, so we can see them go from puppyhood to adolescence to strong adulthood and then into their sunset years in 10 to 12 years. It really drives home the point of how finite all our lives are.

Middle Age - later than you think and sooner than you expect.

When we look on the roses and gaiety of youth, the mournful idea of mortality is altogether alien to our thoughts. We have heard of it as a speculation and a tale, but nothing but experience can bring it home to us.

We kind of deny the stages of life.

I can feel the gradual decline of energy and vitality. And I mean generally, every year, when you know you are not on the same level as last year. But that's life.

Father Time is whether you're an athlete or not an athlete. Father Time is always around. I think I'm just special.

I don't like ageing, I don't like being older, time is going too fast, and life is like a train running at high speed. I have a real problem with it.

We do not gain or surrender our personhood as we age. We live one life from conception to death.

When we are no longer children, we are already dead.

The child's toys and the old man's reasons are the fruits of two seasons.

Time indeed has very little to do with living except at its beginning or near its end.

What is life when you come to think upon it, but a most excellent, accurately set, infinitely complicated machine for turning fat playful puppies into old mangy blind dogs, and proud war horses into skinny nags, and succulent young boys, to whom the world holds great delights and terrors, into old weak men, with running eyes, who drink ground rhino-horn?

A man's liberal and conservative phases seem to follow each other in a succession of waves from the time he is born. Children are radicals. Youths are conservatives, with a dash of criminal negligence. Men in their prime are liberals (as long as their digestion keeps pace with their intellect). The middle aged run to shelter: they insure their life, draft a will, accumulate mementos and occasional tables, and hope for security. And then comes old age, which repeats childhood - a time full of humors and sadness, but often full of courage and even prophecy.