Barker Quotes

There are lives lived for love, and lives lived for art. We, happy band, have chosen the later persuasion. ~ Clive Barker

You know, you hear about these writers reading 'Lolita' at 12. I wanted to be a chemistry teacher. ~ Susan Barker

What did it matter, anyway, he thought, whether this was a real place or a dream? It felt real, and that was all that mattered. ~ Clive Barker

I think babies cry when they're born because they're born with the knowledge of all the terrible shit that's gonna happen to them. That's why I never had kids. Every life is a death sentence. We just forget it later in life, like dreams we lose the second we wake up. Whether we worry about it or not, the shit's still going to fly. The important thing is we're here. At least for now. ~ Clive Barker

Take care of your colon and your colon will take care of you. ~ Travis Barker

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

In most houses, militiamen received no quarter. "All that we found in the houses were put to death," Lieutenant Barker said. Lieutenant McKenzie confirmed this practice. ~ Thomas Fleming

The scent of sweet cherry had attracted hundreds of ants. They were crawling over it and into it, many drowning for their greed. ~ Clive Barker

Tennis is a battle of the minds, just as much as it is a battle of playing ability. Trying to expose your opponent's weaknesses is one of the most vital and fascinating facets of tennis. ~ Sue Barker

It feels like I've died," he said to Caz when he'd finished.
"Well, you didn't."
"And I should be grateful, right?"
"Right."
"Well, I'm not. ~ Clive Barker

I keep a bedside journal. I am very affected by dream information. They might be scary to other people, but they're mine, so they don't feel scary. I'd wake up in a cold sweat if I didn't dream these things ... ~ Clive Barker

I once died my hair blonde, and it looked like an orangey-red carrot top. It was the '80s, and I was trying to look like George Michael. At the time, the ladies loved it, and I loved it too! ~ Nigel Barker

The white bowl of the street began to fill with darkness, from the pavement upwards, like somebody pouring tea into a cup. ~ Pat Barker

Everyone gets a pencil as a kid, but it doesn't make them all authors or painters or drawers or anything else. ~ Nigel Barker

Anyway, it's gone. And there's nothing left in my pocket to charm you. So from now on it's going to have to be tears or nothing I'm afraid.
That's all I've got left to tell you see: tears, tears, tears. ~ Clive Barker

Even though photographers are only shooting the outside, beauty is more about who you are as a person - the life you lead - not your facade. ~ Nigel Barker

We must educate the public. The average person has no idea of what's going on in factory farms, in laboratories, circuses, roadside zoos or rodeos. ~ Bob Barker

I've often taken important classical, biblical or literary stories and interrogated them. I have tried to reinvigorate Lot by interpreting it differently. ~ Howard Barker

I'm truly excited to align with Art.co.uk and share with the world the wondrous sites and travels I've experienced. ~ Nigel Barker

I'm super serious about that stuff. I mean, it's rare that I sit down at a drum set when I'm not touring, because we tour so much. ~ Travis Barker

Most of 'Let the Great World Spin' is centered on the day in 1974 when Philippe Petit walked on a tightrope between the two towers of the World Trade Center, creating an astonishing spectacle that intersects with the lives of many of the novel's multiple protagonists. ~ Susan Barker

We are here to do a great work because the mind that created us knew what it wanted us to do when it created us. ~ Raymond Charles Barker

Every night before you go to bed write down three things good that happened to you that day. That's pretty much all it takes to get a happiness boost over time. ~ Eric Barker

It was that sleep itself - the act of closing the eyes and relinquishing control of her consciousness - was something she was temperamentally unsuited to. ~ Clive Barker

He was a windblown blossom of some two hundred pounds with freckled teeth and the mellow voice of a circus barker. He was tough, fast and he ate red meat. Nobody could push him around. He was the kind of cop who spits on his blackjack every night instead of saying his prayers. But he had humorous eyes. ~ Raymond Chandler

Either in or out of time, the decision of a personal agency to commit an action happens antecedent to the action itself. Even if the deciding and the acting happened simultaneously, it would still not be true that the acting was antecedent to the deciding. Imagine God saying, Oh, look! I just created a universe. Now I'd better decide to do it. ~ Dan Barker

- when the sun goes out and there's only night, we'll live on the earth. It'll be ours. ~ Clive Barker

Basic atheism is not a belief. It is the lack of belief. There is a difference between believing there is no god and not believing there is a god - both are atheistic, though popular usage has ignored the latter. ~ Dan Barker

Remember, Lucius, that everything you learn is already a part of you, even to the Godhead Itself. Study nothing except in the knowledge that you already knew it. Worship nothing except in adoration of your true self. And fear nothing"--there the Maestro stopped and shuddered, as though he had a presentiment--"fear nothing except in the certainty that you are your enemy's begetter and its only hope of healing. For everything that does evil is in pain. Will you remember those things? ~ Clive Barker

I looked Death right in the face. ~ Travis Barker

My dear young woman, appearances are the only true reality. ~ Emily Croy Barker

Well, she's lucky. She still has her little dominion here in Coldheart Canyon. ~ Clive Barker

He who knows Love becomes Love, and he knows All beings are himself, twin-born of Love. ~ Elsa Barker

Ryder has appeared in my dreams once in a while, and in my thoughts a little more often through the last five years (...) ~ Raffaella Barker

So quickly? Todd cleared away another wave of tears and looked down at the body on the table. Dempsey's eye was still half-open, but it didn't look back at him any longer. Where there'd been a sliver of bright life, where there'd been mischief and shared rituals - where, in short, there'd been Dempsey - there was nothing. ~ Clive Barker

I submit all my plays to the National Theatre for rejection. To assure myself I am seeing clearly. ~ Howard Barker

As later Priam comes secretly to the enemy camp to plead with Achilles for the return of his son Hector's body, he says: "'I do what no man before me has ever done, I kiss the hands of the man who killed my son."
Those words echoed round me, as I stood in the storage hut, surrounded on all sides by the wealth Achilles had plundered from burning cities. I thought: "And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brothers. ~ Pat Barker

I never want to be the producer that I too often got. ~ Clive Barker

You have to taste the sour urine before you break the jug. ~ Clive Barker

Evil, however powerful it seemed, could be undone by its own appetite. ~ Clive Barker

Everywhere, in the wreckage around him, he found evidence to support the same bitter thesis: that he had encountered nothing in his life - no person, no state of mind or body - he wanted sufficiently to suffer even passing discomfort for. ~ Clive Barker

I think that age as a number is not nearly as important as health. You can be in poor health and be pretty miserable at 40 or 50. If you're in good health, you can enjoy things into your 80s. ~ Bob Barker

Whatever country you live in, any law based on "glory" instead of real harm is dangerous. The glory of the nation, or the glory of the monarchy, or the glory of the superior race, or the glory of the church have been the cause of horrible wars and legally sanctioned discrimination. Any laws based solely on these glories should be morally denounced. They cause unnecessary harm. ~ Dan Barker

There is joy in rationality, happiness in clarity of mind. Freethought is thrilling and fulfilling - absolutely essential to mental health and happiness. ~ Dan Barker

We're too much ourselves. Afraid of letting go of what we are, in case we are nothing, and holding on so tight, we lose everything else. ~ Clive Barker

Wherever I go, I will speak of you with love. ~ Clive Barker

Prosperity is the ability to do what you want to do at
the instant you want to do it. ~ Raymond Charles Barker

Funny that. We live in islands of Hours and we never seem to have time enough for anything ... ~ Clive Barker

Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness - a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest self, which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of a kitchen chair - then this confirmation that you have triumphed again and managed to gull yet another mark, except this time it was the one person you'd hoped might be immune to your ever-creakier, puddle-shallow, sideshow-barker variation on adorable, even though you'd been launching this campaign weekly with a single-minded concentration from day one - well, it conjures up feelings that are best described as mixed, to say the least. ~ David Rakoff

Leavening the flat bread of what we know, with the yeast of what we dream may come to pass. ~ Clive Barker

Most 'reality' shows aren't reality at all. They're game shows with no prize. Like 'Rock of Love.' His aren't genuine feelings. Then again, Bob Barker didn't really care whether or not you won the toaster. Sorry to shatter everyone's dreams. ~ Hal Sparks

Sometimes, in the trenches, you get the sense of something, ancient. One trench we held, it had skulls in the side, embedded, like mushrooms. It was actually easier to believe they were men from Marlborough's army, than to think they'd been alive a year ago. It was as if all the other wars had distilled themselves into this war, and that made it something you almost can't challenge. It's like a very deep voice, saying; 'Run along, little man, be glad you've survived ~ Pat Barker

It is a fact of history and of current events that human beings exaggerate, misinterpret, or wrongly remember events. They have also fabricated pious fraud. Most believers in a religion understand this when examining the claims of other religions. ~ Dan Barker

But she felt as though whatever she'd been given in the Devil's Country it was affecting her mind, not her body, and it was not doing anything remotely healing. Quite the reverse. ~ Clive Barker

Even if it is true that all cultures share a common morality, why does this prove a supreme intelligence? After all, don't we humanists sometimes claim that there is a common thread of humanistic values running through history across cultural and religious lines? ~ Dan Barker

I was in a real conservative area just outside of Chicago recently. And this guy's like, 'Hey, Arj, you're from San Francisco. Are you in favor of gay marriage?' I was like, 'Well, I'd like to get to know you a little bit better first. I don't know what ever happened to buying a guy a smoothie and seeing what happens. That's how we do it back home. ~ Arj Barker

The places where death comes to take love away, where we lose each other and lose ourselves; that's where the connections begin. It takes a brave soul to look there and not despair."
"I've tried to be brave," she said.
"I know," he said softly. "I know. ~ Clive Barker

The past guarantees you nothing in the future if the rules change. ~ Joel A. Barker

Write 'judge of beautiful women' on my tombstone. I'd be quite happy. ~ Nigel Barker

I will say it one last time: Demonation! The feeling of it! There are no words -how can there be?- to describe what it feels like to become words, to feel your life encoded, and laid out in black ink on white paper. All my love and hatred, melted into words. It was like the End of the World. ~ Clive Barker

I have deeper journeys to take. Metaphysical journeys to see Christ. Shaman journeys. It's what I have been elected by God to do. ~ Clive Barker

I play Orange County drums. I love those guys. I've got a four piece kit. ~ Travis Barker

You should go tho the past, looking not for messages or warnings, but simply to be humbled by the weight of human experience that has preceded the brief flicker of your own few days. ~ Pat Barker

Is the noble Lord aware that, at the age of 80, there are very few pleasures left to me, but one of them is passive smoking? ~ Jean Barker, Baroness Trumpington

[...] but perhaps no kindness was possible between owner and slave, only varying degrees of brutality? ~ Pat Barker

He was to be their page, their book, the vessel for their autobiographies. A book of blood. A book made of blood. A book written in blood. ~ Clive Barker

It was one thing to read about a society obsessed with female purity - quite another to find yourself living in one. ~ Emily Croy Barker

Your kind has a superstitious terror of things ugly and broken; you fear that their condition may somehow infect you. ~ Clive Barker

Putting down the devil was the Lord's own sport. ~ Clive Barker

People think New York is this big city where no one knows each other, but when you live in the Village, it's the opposite. ~ Nigel Barker

I don't think that the despiritualised, dehumanised culture in which we live, the McDonalds and Disney culture, does our internal lives, our mythological lives, any favours at all. In other words, to be an Outsider in this culture now is to be looking inside at a plastic world, and I think it's easier to critique that world if I don't belong to it ... In Hollywood where I live now, there's a lot of having lunches, a lot of going to parties ... and I will have no part of that. I'm certainly not very good at it, I don't like it and I feel a little weird about it. I don't want to be part of the problem, I want to be a part of the solution, and the only way I can help solve the problem of the plasticity of our world is by writing, by painting and by making my work, so I stay where I can do that, which is at my desk, in my studio. I will venture out when I need to sell a book or exhibit my paintings, but the rest of the time my job is to be here and imagine. ~ Clive Barker

Zombies are the ideal late twentieth-century monsters. A zombie is the one thing you can't deal with. It survives anything. Frankenstein's monster and Dracula could be sent down in so many ways. Zombies, though, fall outside all this. You can't argue with them. They just keep coming at you. ~ Clive Barker

Ricky tasted something he hadn't experienced since childhood: the panic of losing the hand of a guardian. In this case the lost parent was his sanity. Somewhere ~ Clive Barker

I grew up reading Stephen King, Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Robert McCammon, Isaac Asimov's nonfiction books, and Roald Dahl. ~ Nnedi Okorafor

Nothing is true unless it works. And it has to work for you, not for someone else. ~ Raymond Charles Barker

It was what his mother would have done in the circumstances. Boiled some fresh water, warmed the pot and counted out the spoonfuls of tea. Setting domestic order against the chaos, in the hope of winning some temporary reprieve from the vale of tears. ~ Clive Barker

What worth was a man who could not be haunted? ~ Clive Barker

Designers simply can't afford to make dresses in 10 sizes for a sample. ~ Nigel Barker

Many of the most obvious conflicts between science and religion involve timing issues - the dating of events in Earth's history. Bible chronologies typically list Adam and Eve at about 4,000 BC. In contrast, science textbooks can hardly be found that do not refer to human or "pre-human" remains 10,000 to millions of years old. Why the discrepancy? ~ David Barker

And this story, having no beginning, will have no end. ~ Clive Barker

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. ~ Clive Barker

Can you hear me, Todd? There's an ambulance on its way." For a moment his eyes opened a little wider, and he seemed to be making an effort to concentrate on the face in front of him. "It's Maxine," she said. "Remember me? ~ Clive Barker

I was a typical kid. I dug holes in the yard, threw rocks, had plum battles with the neighbours and used trash can lids as shields. I was always outside getting dirty. ~ Arj Barker

You'll learn, honey. Love can be the best thing in life. And it can be the worst. The absolute worst. ~ Clive Barker

Watch for the high tides of yourself and flow up with them; when the inevitable low tides come, either rest or meditate. You cannot escape rhythm. You transcend it by working with it. ~ Elsa Barker

In some ways the experience of these young men paralleled the experience of the very old. They looked back on intense memories and felt lonely because there was nobody left alive who'd been there. ~ Pat Barker

Here is a list of terrible things,
The jaws of sharks, a vultures wings
The rabid bite of the dogs of war,
The voice of one who went before,
But most of all the mirror's gaze,
Which counts us out our numbered days. ~ Clive Barker

Abaratians are very much about living in the moment; living life because that's what we've got, we've got today, we've got now, we've got being alive now and we have to be awake and alive in the moment and not asleep in our lives. And they would find the idea of sleeping through your life, of being bored - they would think that was very stupid - why would you be bored when there's so much to do and so much to see and so much to be? ~ Clive Barker

Many old music hall fans were present at the funeral today of Fred 'Chuckles' Jenkins, Britain's oldest and unfunniest comedian. In tribute, the vicar read out one of Fred's jokes, and the congregation had two minutes silence. ~ Ronnie Barker

Has anyone here ever heard of the Harrowing?" Dale asked, breaking the silence. No one replied. "It was in the time between Christ's crucifixion and his Resurrection," he went on. "The story goes, Christ went down into Hell, walked among the damned, and set many of them free. Then he returned to Earth and broke the bondage of death. It's supposedly the first and only amnesty Hell has ever known. ~ Clive Barker

The true Wonderland was not like that, he knew. It was as much shadow as sunlight, and its mysteries could only be unveiled when your wits were about used up and your mind close to cracking. ~ Clive Barker

Perhaps sunlight had always been luminous, and doorways signs of greater passage than that of one room to another. But she'd not noticed it until now. ~ Clive Barker

I don't like sympathetic characters. ~ Howard Barker

I know that I want to bring sex and horror together as I have been able to in my books. ~ Clive Barker

Now that Janet and Frances were older, Grandpa would let them visit him in his study, where the parrot lived. Grandpa came from a long line of parrot-keeping men, and Polly's predecessor, a white cockatoo, had fought with Wellington's armies in the Napoleonic Wars. Janet's father's earliest memories were of the astonishing oaths known to this bird, who was then a hundred and two years old and spoke in ripe gamey accents long since gone from the world of men. Grandpa believed that there must be a fair number of such long-lived birds in Scotland - even perhaps in England - and it would have been a fine thing to have them all gathered in a great dining hall, invoking ghostly midshipmen and dragoons, violent drinkers and merry rhymesters, perhaps even occasionally a lady of refinement. This, he said, would afford a historical experience of rare value; indeed, ancient parrots should be fêted and cultivated as true archivists. ~ Elspeth Barker

So small, so blue, in grassy places / My flowers raise / Their tiny faces. ~ Cicely Mary Barker

O little one,
My little one,
Come with me,
Your life is done.
Forget the future,
Forget the past.
Life is over:
Breathe your last. ~ Clive Barker

Beauty is there, you just have to look ~ Bobbie Barker

Isn't atheism just another religion?' No, it isn't. Atheism has no creeds, rituals, holy book, absolute moral code, origin myth, sacred spaces or shrines. It has no sin, divine judgment, forbidden words, prayer, worship, prophecy, group privileges, or anointed 'holy' leaders. Atheists don't believe in a transcendent world or supernatural afterlife. Most important, there is no orthodoxy in atheism. ~ Dan Barker

UFO is a bucket of shit. ~ Gray Barker