Anne Rice

“Still whining, Louis!”

“...what was the good of being a movie werewolf? You howled at the moon; you couldn't remember what you did, and then somebody shot you.”

“I never lie," I said offhand. "At least not to those I don't love.”

“Do devils love each other? Do they walk arm in arm in hell saying, “Ah, you are my friend, how I love you,” things like that to each other?...it was a matter of a concept of evil, wasn't it? All creatures in hell are supposed to hate one another, as all the saved hate the damned, without reservation.”

“The old gods will bring about vengeance not so much because they exist but because I once honored them.”

“Say what you will to the force that governs the universe. Perhaps we'll call it into being, and it will yet love us as we love it.”

“-You are on the verge of being truly mad.-No, not at all. Look at me. I can tie my shoelaces. See?”

“Do we have to confess our loves to everyone?" asked Thorne softly. "Can we not keep some secrets?”

“It's all about aesthetics, morality and aesthetics are completely similar.”

“I lived like a man who wanted to die but who had no courage to do it himself.”

“With his finger curled under his lip, his elbow on the arm of the couch, he merely studied me as I recounted the memories, and now he was eager for the tale to go on.”

“As we move on year by year in this life, we learn that telling doesn't necessarily purge; telling something is merely a reliving, and it's a torment.”

“That morning I was not yet a vampire, and I saw my last sunrise. I remember it completely, and yet I can't recall any sunrise before it. I watched its whole magnificence for the last time as if it were the first. And then I said farewell to sun light, and set out to become what I became.”

“And what if I never go of my own free will? Will you pitch me from some windowso that I must fly or fall? Will you bolt all shutters after me? You had better, becauseI'll knock and knock and knock until I fall down dead. I'll have no wings that take meaway from you.”

“I think this is a very important thing to understand about Christianity. It was from its very beginnings, it seems, a religion of great quarrels and wars, and it wooed the power of temporal authorities, and made them part of itself in the hope of resolving through sheer force its many arguments.”

“His blood coursed through my veins sweeter than life itself. And as it did, Lestats words made sense to me.I knew peace only when I killed and when I heard his heart in that terrible rhythm,I knew again what peace could be.”

“I had seen my becoming a vampire in two lights: The first light was simply enchantment... But the other light was my wish for self-destruction.”

“Yes. To write a novel is to risk my sanity. The deeper I get into the suffering and conflict of the characters, into the very situations and thoughts and feelings that make the novel worthwhile, the worse I feel, and the more likely I am to be severely depressed when the book is finished. There is no avoiding this: it is the result of attempting to tell all you know, to reach for the stars, to write what matters.”

“[...] so important to believe in a concept of goodness, even if we make it up ourselves. We don't really make it up. it's there, isn't it?""Oh, yes, it's there," she said. "It's there because we put it there.”

“In the flesh,” Maharet said. “In the flesh all wisdom begins. Beware the thing that has no flesh. Beware the gods, beware the idea, beware the devil.”

“Muy pocos seres buscan de verdad el conocimiento en este mundo. Mortales o inmortales, son escasos los que hacen preguntas. Al contrario, casi todos intentan extraer de lo desconocido las respuestas a las que ya han dado forma en sus propias mentes; justificaciones, confirmaciones, formas de consuelo sin las cuales serian incapaces de continuar adelante. Preguntar de verdad es abrir la puerta a un torbellino. La respues puede aniquilar a la vez la pregunta y quien la hace.”

“Los pensamientos son imprecisos. Si te abro mi mente, no puedo controlar realmente lo que puedas leer en ella. Y, si soy yo quien lee en la tuya, es posible malinterprete lo que vea u oiga. Prefiero utilizar el lenguaje hablado y dejar que mis facultades mentales se expresen a traves de el....Para ser totalmente sincero, creo que el lenguaje es el mayor don que comparten mortales e inmortales.”

“Lestat and Louie feel sorry for vampires that sparkle in the sun. They would never hurt immortals who choose to spend eternity going to high school over and over again in a small town ---- anymore than they would hurt the physically disabled or the mentally challenged. My vampires possess gravitas. They can afford to be merciful.”

“It's not so," I said. "And how long do you think it will sustain you, feeling and seeing and touching and tasting, if there is no love? No one with you?”

“Even if a ghost is ripping a house to pieces, throwing tin pans all over, pouring water on pillows, making clocks chime at all hours, mortals will accept almost any "natural explanation" offered, no matter how absurd, rather than the obvious supernatural one, for what is going on.”

“I'm speaking of the character of human beings, not what they believe in. I'm speaking of those who won't accept a useless life just because they were born to it. I mean those who would be something better. They work, they sacrifice, they do things..." He was moved by this, and I was a little surprised that I'd said it. Yet I felt I'd had hurt him somehow. "There is blessedness in that." I said. "There's sanctity. And God or no God, there is goodness in it. I know this the way I know the mountains are out there, that the stars shine.”

“All my life,I've been afraid of things, as a child and a woman must be. I lied about it naturally. I fancied myself a witch and walked in dark streets to punish myself for my doubts. But I knew what it meant to be afraid.”

“But I lived a lie. I lived it out of anger. This is what I am trying to tell you. I have lived lies. I have done it again and again. I live lies because I cannot endure the weakness of anger and I cannot admit the irrationality of love. Oh the lies I have told myself and others. I knew it yet I didn't know.”

“...his hand spread itself out flat on the table. I paused and took another good look at him. There was something otherworldly about him, the way that he sat, the way he used this one hand to gesture. It was the decorum primitive people often have that makes them seem repositors of immense wisdom, when in fact all they possess is immense conviction.”

“Dear God, help me. Do not forget me on this tiny cinder lost in a galaxy that is lost–a heart no bigger than a speck of dust beating, beating against death, against meaninglessness, against guilt, against sorrow.”

“He saw the face of his brother on Thanksgiving night, saw Jim's sad weary eyes, and his heart broke, as if his brother were more important than God himself, or God himself was speaking through Jim as he might speak through anyone put in our inevitable or accidental path, anyone who threatened to call us back to ourselves, who looked at us with eyes that reflected a heart as broken as our own, as fragile, as disappointed.”

“There's a virtue,' Felix said, 'to listening to a reluctant storyteller. You know that he is in fact diving deep for the salvageable truth.”

“When we talk about our lives, long or short, brief and tragic or enduring beyond comprehension, we impose a continuity on them, and that continuity is a lie.”

“I was no conscious chronicler or witness of the events that unfolded in those times. Surely you understand. You must understand. Do you look thousands of years into the future? Do you measure what's happening to you now by what may matter a thousand years hence? I was stumbling and lurching, groping and from time to time drowning, as any man might.”

“He was so excited by this little bit of intelligence that he might have gone off, perplexed, pondering for a long time. It was like reading a wonderful sentence in a book, and not being able to continue because so many possibilities were crowding his mind.”

“Pride is the parent of destruction; pride eats the mind and the heart and the soul alive.”

“But all morality is of necessity shaped by context. I'm not talking relativism, no. To ignore the context of a decision is in fact immoral.”

“I'm hoping what all sentient beings hope ... that somehow I'm part of something larger than myself, in which I play a role, an actual role that is somehow intended and meaningful.”

“Garden of Pain, I need you. What were the songs of beasts to the cries of sentient souls?”

“Get thee behind me, tragedy.”

“You killed them, Reuben. You killed them in their sins! You terminated their destiny on this earth. You snatched from them any chance for repentance, for redemption. You took that from them. You took it all, Reuben. You snuffed out forever the years of reparation they might have lived! You took life itself from them and you took it from their descendants, and yes, even from their victims, you took what their amends might have been.”

“Time can tick when there is no clock.”

“Our way–the Western Way–has always been a "work in progress." Questions of life and death, good and evil, justice and tragedy–these are never definitively settled, but must be addressed again and again as personal and public worlds shift and change. We hold our morals to be absolutes, but the context of our actions and decisions is forever changing. We are not relativists because we seek to re-evaluate again and again our most crucial moral positions.”

“Oh, if the moon only had a secret, if the moon only held a truth. But the moon was just the moon.”

“But even those people, cops, lawyers, doctors, learned what they learned from the aftermath. They weren't there when the killer tore at his victim; they didn't smell the scent of evil; they didn't hear the cries to heaven for something, someone, to intervene.”

“She had no idea, really, what it meant to see a man's arm ripped out by the root, to see a head torn off a neck. She had no idea. We human beings live perpetually insulated from the horrors that happen all around us. No matter what she'd suffered, she had not witnessed the vicious ugliness of that kind of death. No, it had to be unreal to her, even Laura who had endured so much.”

“At last he stood staring at the old Reuben Golding he thought he knew so well, and neither had a word for the other that mattered.”

“What a risk, Reuben thought. I could easily hit him over the head and rob the church of its gold candlesticks. He wondered how often Jim had done this kind of thing, or why Jim's life was such a round of sacrifice and exhausting work, how it was Jim could ladle up soup and corned beef hash every day for people who so often let him down, or go through the same ritual every morning at the altar, as if it really was a miracle when he consecrated the bread and wine and gave out "the Body of Christ" in tiny white wafers.”

“God, what is it like to be You and hear all those people all the time everywhere, begging, imploring, calling out for anything and anyone?”

“Phil was mumbling that Reuben might become a writer after all and writers had a way of "redeeming everything that ever happens to them.”