Anne Rice

“The only power that exists is inside ourselves.”

“I feel like an outsider, and I always will feel like one. I've always felt that I wasn't a member of any particular group.”

“My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn't understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become.”

“I wasn't sent here to find angels! I wasn't sent here to dream of them. I wasn't sent here to hear them sing! I was sent here to be alive. To breathe and sweat and thirst and sometimes cry.”

“A singer can shatter glass with the proper high note," he said, "but the simplest way to break glass is simply to drop it on the floor.”

“The fans, the vampire groupies, love the idea of this androgynous, preternatural figure stalking the night, and craving aesthetic pleasure just as he craves blood, wearing only the best velvet clothes, and savoring red roses.”

“The atheism and nihilism of my earlier years now seems shallow, and even a bit cocky.”

“I was the vampire Lestat again. I was back in action. New Orleans was once again my hunting ground.”

“Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.”

“What is fear after all? It is indecision. You seek some way to resist, escape. There is none.”

“I never changed after that. I sought for nothing in the one great source of change which is humanity. And even in my love and absorption with the beauty of the world, I sought to learn nothing that could be given back to humanity. I drank of the beauty of the world as a vampire drinks. I was satisfied. I was filled to the brim. But I was dead. And I was changeless.”

“Let tears gather in your eyes. You haven’t tears enough for what you’ve done to me. Six more mortal years, seven, eight…I might have had that shape!’ Her pointed finger flew at Madeleine, whose hands had risen to her face, whose eyes were clouded over. Her moan was almost Claudia’s name. But Claudia did not hear her. ‘Yes, that shape, I might have known what it was to walk at your side.”

“It was as if this night were only one of thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into night to make a great arching line of which I couldn’t see the end, a night in which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars.”

“Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort.”

“Handsome enough’ is this Grim Reaper, Who can snuff all these ‘brief candles,’ every fluttering soul sucking the air, from this hall.”

“I was good and bad, but never wicked.”

“I don't like myself you know. I love myself. I'm devoted to myself till my dying day. But I don't like myself.”

“Yes, I know," "And I love to hear you say it, Louis. I need to hear you say it. I don't think anyone will ever say it quite like you do. Come on, say it again. I'm a perfect devil. Tell me how bad I am. It makes me feel so good!”

“You're a perfect devil, Lestat!" "That's what you are! You are the devil himself!”

“If I am an angel, paint me with black wings.”

“I am an unwilling devil. I cry like some vagrant child. I want to go home.”

“God did not live in this church; these statues gave an image to nothingness. I was the supernatural in this cathedral. I was the only Supermortal thing that stood conscious under this roof! Loneliness. Loneliness to the point of madness. The cathedral crumbled in my vision; the saints listed and fell. Rats ate the Holy Eucharist and nested on the sills. A solitary rat with an enormous tail stood tugging and gnawing at the rotted altar cloth until the candlesticks fell and rolled on the slime-covered stones. And I remained standing. Untouched.”

“Men and women are learning animals. If you do not see what they have learned, you're blind. They are creatures ever changing, ever improving, ever expanding their vision and the capacity of their hearts. You are not fair to them when you speak of this as the most bloody century; you are not seeing the light that shines ever more radiantly on account of the darkness; you are not. seeing the evolution of the human soul!… …True, what you say about war. Yes, and the cries of the dying, I too have heard them; we have all heard them, through all the decades; and even now, the world is shocked by daily reports of armed conflict. But it is the outcry against these horrors which is the light I speak of; it's the attitudes which were never possible in the past. It is the intolerance of thinking men and women in power who for the first time in the history of the human race truly want to put an end to injustice in all forms. -- Marius to Akasha (The Vampire Chronicles) ”

“Oh, the lies that I have told myself and others. I knew it yet I didn't know.”

“But don't you see, all human decisions are made like this. Do you think the mother knows what will happen to the child in her womb? Dear God, we are lost, I tell you. What does it matter if you give it to me and it's wrong! There is no wrong! There is only desperation, and I would have it! I want to live forever with you.”

“Was it fair to say I didn't know the full state of my soul?”

“I think to feel this happy is to be miserable, to feel this much satisfaction is to burn.”

“As if it were our very birthright, which we could not come to grasp the meaning of until this time of middle life when we looked on only as many years ahead as already lay behind us.”

“The evil of one murder is infinite, and my guilt is like my beauty - eternal. I cannot be forgiven, for there is no one to forgive me for all I've done.”

“Go where the pleasure is in your writing. Go where the pain is. Write the book you would like to read. Write the book you have been trying to find but have not found. But write. And remember, there are no rules for our profession. Ignore rules. Ignore what I say here if it doesn't help you. Do it your own way. Every writer knows fear and discouragement. Just write.The world is crying for new writing. It is crying for fresh and original voices and new characters and new stories. If you won't write the classics of tomorrow, well, we will not have any.”

“For always in her there was a dark place full of despair and a great dividing force to make meaning because there was none.”

“It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words.”

“So we reach into the raging chaos, and we cling to it, and we tell ourselves it has meaning, and that the world is good, and we are not evil, and we will all go home in the end.”

“Sometimes fear is a warning. It's like someone putting a hand on your shoulder and saying Go No Farther.”

“To write something you have to risk making a fool of yourself.”

“One will hate you for taking his life, another will run to excesses that you scorn. A third will emerge mad and raving, another a monster you cannot control. One will be jealous of your superiority, another shut you out... And the veil will always come down between you Make a legion, you will be, always and forever alone!”

“A starving child is a frightful sight. A starving vampire, even worse.”

“Dig deep, deep, my soul, to find the heart--the blood, the heat, the shrine and resting place. Dig deep, deep into the moist soil all the way to where they lie, those I love--she, Mother, with her dark hair loose and gone, her bones long since tumbled in the back of the vault, as other coffins came to rest in her spot, but in this dream I range them round me to hold as if she were there...”

“That is the crowning evil, that we can even go so far as to love each other, you and I. And who else would show us a particle of love, a particle of compassion or mercy? Who else, knowing us as we know each other, could do anything but destroy us? Yet we can love each other.”

“I allowed myself to forget how totally I had fallen in love with Lestat's iridescent eyes, that I'd sold my soul for a many-colored and luminescent thing, thinking that a highly reflective surface conveyed the power to walk on water.”

“I love you still, that's the torment of it. Lestat I never loved. But you! The measure of my hatred is that love. They are the same! Do you know now how much I hate you!”

“Aren't there gradations of evil? Is evil a great perilous gulf into which one falls with the first sin, plummeting to the depth?”

“You know nothing... And suppose the vampire who made you knew nothing, and the vampire who made that vampire knew nothing, and the vampire before him knew nothing, and so it goes back and back, nothing proceeding from nothing, until there is nothing! And we must live with the knowledge that there is no knowledge.”

“Would that death were like this. Would that one would sleep and sleep and sleep forever.”

“How could anyone love Him? What did you just tell me yourself about the world? Don't you see, everybody hates God now. It's not that God is dead in the twentieth century. It's that everybody hates Him! At least I think so.”

“Do you know what I think about crying? I think some people have to learn to do it. But once you learn, once you know how to really cry, there's nothing quite like it. I feel sorry for those who don't know the trick. It's like whistling or singing.”

“God, why didn't you make us all dogs?”

“I want to love all the children of God - Christian, Jew, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist - everyone. I want to love gay Christians and straight Christians.”

“There are so many books I mean to read, and things I mean to see.”

“We're frightened of what makes us different.”