Lindsay Clarke > Quotes

“We don’t sleep to sleep, dammit, any more than we eat to eat . We sleep to dream. We’re amphibians. We live in two elements and we need both."

Edward Nesbit”
― Lindsay Clarke, The Chymical Wedding

“Even dumb objects have their destiny. Rarely given a second thought, they perform their unconsidered duty day by day until their moment arrives and everything seems to hang on their location.”
― Lindsay Clarke

“His guess was confirmed when they approached the well-built harbour of a prosperous town and saw the banners flying from the bastions of the citadel. After the sultry heat of Zarzis, the sailors’ hearts were lifted and refreshed by the airy music reaching their ears as they pulled in towards the marble wharf. Only when they docked did they realise that they were listening to the sound of the breeze strumming through countless wind-harps and chiming among webs and lattices of translucent shell. It felt as though the wind that had blown them there was now celebrating their arrival.”
― Lindsay Clarke, The Return from Troy

“It’s a dream about how the world was made. It was made by a demented angel. Crazy with loneliness, he looked into a mirror and the mirror cracked, and thus the world was made. We can wander about picking up the pieces if we like, but all we ever see is our own face squinting back. Through a crack. Darkly. It’s a cold place, you see. A place of question and cold wind. And with such poor lighting that we can only see at all because the mirror’s back is black. It was a botched job, Cambridge. The Gnostics knew it. They knew there’s Gnothing for us here. So your father and mine would have been much wiser not to bring us here at all. They should have left us where we belong - out across that milky way which begins beyond the rim of the universe and ends between our thighs. But crazy angels that they were, they made us crazy angels too.”
― Lindsay Clarke, The Chymical Wedding

“Power was always with the others, with the death-dealers and those who had obediently evolved the tunnel vision it takes to organize atrocity. The room was already iced in nuclear winter.”
― Lindsay Clarke, The Chymical Wedding

“Everybody has to find their own way out of hell. Just don't fall asleep there, that's all.”
― Lindsay Clarke, The Chymical Wedding

“Now it seems to the artist that all his work is lost. What has become of the Tincture? Here is nothing that is apparent, that can be perceived, recognized or tasted, but darkness, most painful death, a hellish fearful fire, nothing but the wrath and curse of God. (...) Yet he does not see that the Tincture of Life is in this putrefaction, that there is light in this darkness, life in this death, love in this fury and wrath, and in this poison the highest and most precious medicament against all poison and sickness.”
― Lindsay Clarke, The Chymical Wedding