Time & Perspective Quote by Clive Barker

Barker’s line is a quiet act of sabotage against the most comforting lie storytelling sells: the clean beginning. Horror, in his hands, is rarely a door you open; it’s a room you realize you’ve been in for hours. “Nothing ever begins” rejects the ceremonial first chapter and replaces it with a creeping continuity, the sense that every event is already mid-curse, mid-contagion, mid-revelation. That’s not just a philosophical shrug about time. It’s craft. By denying an origin point, Barker denies you the safety of causality, the neat reassurance that if you can locate the first mistake, you can prevent the rest.

The subtext is almost theological. If there’s “no first moment,” then evil (or desire, or transformation) isn’t an intruder; it’s part of the architecture. Barker’s worlds often treat the body and the imagination as porous, and this quote extends that porosity to narrative itself: stories don’t “spring” from a single source because they’re fed by buried histories, inherited traumas, half-remembered myths. The image of a story “springing” is pointedly pastoral, even innocent; Barker snaps it shut. There’s no pure wellhead. Only seepage.

Context matters: Barker emerges from a late-20th-century British horror tradition that’s skeptical of tidy moral order, but he’s also writing in the wake of postmodern distrust of master narratives. His twist is to make that distrust tactile and unnerving. If there’s no beginning, there’s no outside. You’re already in it, and the story is simply the moment you notice.