Anne Rice

“It's the way that life asserts itself, no matter what the circumstances. Of course it must be a miserable existence. How could it not be? Yet those little girls manage to live; to breathe; to enjoy themselves. They laugh and they are full of curiosity and tenderness. They adjust, I believe that's the word. They adjust and they reach for the stars in their own way. I tell you it's wondrous to me. They make me think of the wild flowers that grow in the cracks of pavement, just pushing up into the sun, no matter how many feet crush them down.”

“Viejas verdades y magias antiguas, revoluciones e inventos, todo conspira para distraernos de la pasión que, de un modo u otro, nos vence a todos. Y, cansados por fin de esta complejidad, soñamos con el tiempo lejano en que nos sentábamos en el regazo de nuestra madre y cada beso era la consumación perfecta del deseo.”

“The greatest create of power you have on earth, whether you are an angel, a spirit, a man or woman or child is to help others.”

“Be kind. Always if you have a choice, be kind.”

“A perfectly evil Devil makes even less sense than a perfect God.”

“Mortal beauty often makes me ache, and mortal grandeur can fill me with that longing...but Paris, Paris drew me close to her heart, so I forgot myself entirely. Forgot the damned and questing preternatural thing that doted on mortal skin and mortal clothing. Paris overwhelmed, and lightened and rewarded more richly than any promise. ”

“I see." said the vampire thoughtfully.”

“an intoxication with forbidden knowledge in which the natural things become unimportant.”

“Let the flesh instruct the mind.”

“You see that old woman? That will never happen to you. You will never grow old, and you will never die.And it means something else too, doesn't it? I shall never ever grow up.”

“I saw finally the futility of all these gestures, that witchcraft is but a matter of focus-that one cann apply one's fierce and immeasurable energies to an act of choice.”

“Não importava que Deus no céu fosse católico, protestante ou hindu. O que importava era uma coisa mais profunda, mais antiga e mais forte do que qualquer imagem dessas: um conceito do bem baseado na afirmação da vida, na repulsa à destruição, à perversidade, ao uso e abuso do homem pelo homem. Era a afirmação do humano e do natural.”

“Yet I saw crypts when I looked at him, and I heard the beat of kettledrums. I saw torchlit fields where I had never been, heard vague incantations, felt the heat of raging fires on my face. And they didn't come out of him, these visions. Rather I drew them out on my own.Yet I never had Nicolas, mortal or immortal, been so alluring. Never had Gabrielle held me so in thrall.Dear God, this is love. This is desire. And all my past amours have been but the shadow of this."— Lestat de Lioncourt”

“As I looked down at him, as I saw his yellow hair pressed against my coat, I had a vision of him from long ago, that tall, stately gentleman in the swirling black cape, with his head thrown back, his rich, flawless voice singing the lilting air of the opera from which we'd only just come, his walking stick tapping the cobblestones in time with the music, his large, sparkling eye catching the young woman who stood by, enrapt, so that a smile spread over his face as the song died on his lips; and for one moment, that one moment when his eye met hers, all evil seemed obliterated in that flush of pleasure, that passion for merely being alive.”

“I had wanted to say that my song was far too painful to sing.”

“I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.”

“People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil... Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.”

“Revenge is the concern of those who are at some point or other beaten. I am not beaten, I told myself. No, not beaten. And victory is far more interesting to contemplate than revenge.”

“Ochii aceia căprui păreau să-l străpungă; ah, ce delicioasă dezorientare, ce superbă certitudine că era luat în braţe, scos în afara contextului material, şi că la urmă avea să simtă degetele acelea fine înconjurându-i blând gâtul, şi dinţii care-i străpungeau pielea!”

“Pamper the mad man.”

“You are someone worth loving”

“I kept glancing at him and away from him, as if his green eyes were hurting me. In modern parlance he was a laser beam. Deadly and delicate he seemed. His victims had always loved him. And I had always loved him, hadn't I, no matter what happened, and how strong could love grow if you had eternity to nourish it, and it took only these few moments in time to renew its momentum, its heat?-Lestat”

“I was a newborn vampire, weeping at the beauty of the night.”

“The spirit who inhabits her animates us all. Destroy the host, you destroy the power. The young die first; the old wither slowly; the eldest perhaps would go last. But she is the Queen of the Damned, and the Damned can't live without her.”

“We live in a world full of accidents finally in which on aesthetic principles have a consistency of which we can be sure. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever striving to create and maintain an ethical balance. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever, striving to create and maintain an ethical balance; but the shimmer of summer rain under the street lamps or the great flashing glare of artillery against a night sky – such brutal beauty is beyond dispute.”

“The truth is, laughter always sounds more perfect than weeping. Laughter flows in a violent riff and is effortlessly melodic. Weeping is often fought, choked, half strangled, or surrendered to with humiliation.”

“I assume I don't need an introduction.”

“I know nothing of god or the devil. I have never learned a secret nor found a cure that would damn or save my soul.”

“Just remember... life without me would be even more unbearable.”

“So until we meet again, I am thinking of you always; I love you; I wish you were here...in my arms.”

“From my stone pillow I have dreamed dreams of the mortal world above. I have heard its voices, its new music, as lullabies as I lie in my grave. I have envisioned its fantastical discoveries. I have known its courage in the timeless sanctum of my thoughts. And though it shuts me out with its dazzling forms, I long for one with the strength to roam it fearlessly, to ride the Devil's Road through its heart.”

“In the moment of surrender, I let go of all the theological or social questions which had kept me from Him for countless years. I simply let them go. There was the sense, profound and wordless, that if He knew everything I did not have to know everything, and that, in seeking to know everything, I'd been, all of my life, missing the entire point. No social paradox, no historic disaster, no hideous record of injustice or misery should keep me from Him. No question of Scriptural integrity, no torment over the fate of this or that atheist or gay friend, no worry for those condemned and ostracized by my church or any other church should stand between me and Him….I didn't have to know how He was going to save the unlettered and the unbaptized, or how He would redeem the conscientious heathen who had never spoken His name. I didn't have to know how my gay friends would find their way to Redemption or how my hardworking secular humanist friends could or would receive the power of His Saving Grace. I didn't have to know why good people suffered agony or died in pain. He knew. And it was his knowing that overwhelmed me…”

“…being an atheist required discipline very like that of being Catholic. One could never yield to the idea of a supernatural authority, no matter how often one might be tempted. To think that a personal God had made the world was to yield to a demonic and superstitious and destructive belief. ”

“It seems to me in retrospect that the department stores and the dime stores did an excellent job of extending the 'sacred space' of Christmas in those days. And I sometimes wonder whether for people of no religion, this might have been the only sacred space they knew. When people rail now against the 'commercial nature of Christmas,' I'm always conflicted an unable to respond. Because I think those who would banish commercialism from the holiday fail to understand how precious and comforting the shop displays and music can be.”

“Then, are you master of us all? You didn't teach her that. Was she supposed to imbibe it from my quiet subservience?”

“Don't you see? I'm not the spirit of any age. I'm at odds with everything and always have been! I have never belonged anywhere with anyone at any time!”

“Z ponurych proroków wieków minionych nowy wiek uczynił głupców”

“An evil for these times destined to move through the world in handsome human guise.”

“I am in love with you', I responded.He laughed the most beguiling and gentle laugh.'Of course you are,' he replied. 'I understand perfectly because I'm in love with myself. The fact that I'm not transfixed in front of the nearest mirror takes a great deal of self-control.'It was my turn to laugh.”

“Knowledge drifts in and out of my mind", said Lestat with a little look of honest distress and a shake of his head. "I devour it and then I lose it and sometimes I can't reach for any knowledge that I ought to possess. I feel desolate, but then knowledge returns or I seek it out in a knew source."(...)"But you love books, then", Aunt Queen was saying. I had to listen."Oh, yes," Lestat said. "Sometimes they're the only thing that keeps me alive.""What a thing to say at your age", she laughed."No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don't you think? The young are eternally desperate," he said frankly. "And books, they offer one hope - that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.”

“I tell you, we would be hard put to determine what is more evil -- religion or the pure idea. The intervention of the supernatural or the elegant abstract solution! Both have bathed this earth in suffering; both have brought the human race literally and figuratively to its knees.”

“There are too many other inexplicable things around us--horrors, threats, mysteries that draw you in and then inevitably disenchant you. Back to the predictable and humdrum. The prince is never going to come, everybody knows that; and maybe Sleeping Beauty's dead.”

“How can so much beauty hide such a bruised and steely heart, and why must I love him, why must I lean in my weariness upon his irresistible yet indomitable strength? Is he not the wizend funeral spirit of a dead man in a child's clothes?”

“In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art--the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard's canvases--beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.”

“I live lies because I cannot endure the weakness of anger, and I cannot admit the irrationality of love.”

“I saw my real gods . . the gods of most men. Food, drink, and security in conformity.”

“But during all these years I had a vague but persistent desire to return to New Orleans. I never forgot New Orleans. And when we were in tropical places and places of those flowers and trees that grow in Louisiana, I would think of it acutely and I would feel for my home the only glimmer of desire I felt for anything outside my endless pursuit of art.”

“Because I show you my pain, I do not of necessity love you.”

“You let me handle Marius," I said. "Now, you didn't come without you dagger.""No, I did not," he said, lifting his cloak to reveal it, "And with your permission I would like to plunge it through my heart now so I will most assuredly stone-cold dead before the Master of this house arrives home to find you runnning rampant in his garden!""Permission denied.”

“Don't be a pawn in somebody's game. Find the attitude which gives you the maximum strength and the maximum dignity, no matter what else is going on”