“And it was not merely the dry hissing coil of the thirst that was quenched and dissolved, it was all my craving, all the want and misery and hunger that I had ever known.”

“I wanted love and goodness in this which is living death,' I said. 'It was impossible from the beginning, because you cannot have love and goodness when you do what you know to be evil, what you know to be wrong. You can only have the desperate confusion and longing and the chasing of phantom goodness in its human form. I knew the real answer to my quest before I ever reached Paris. I knew it when I first took a human life to feed my craving. It was my death. And yet I would not accept it, could not accept it, because like all creatures I don't wish to die! And so I sought for other vampires, for God, for the devil, for a hundred things under a hundred names. And it was all the same, all evil. And all wrong. Because no one could in any guise convince me of what I myself knew to be ture, that I was damned in my own mind and soul.”

“I confided again that I wanted him, I wanted him to share my loneliness. I wanted him to share all that I could teach and give. Oh, the pain of it! All that I could teach and give.”

“I believe that I must do everything I can do to lessen misery. That's all I can do, and that is something enormous. It is a great power.”

“Had I ever loved anyone more than I loved him? Had I ever revealed more of my soul to anyone than I had revealed to him? If my tears spilled now, he would see them. If I trembled now, he would know.”

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

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