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

“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!”

“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.”

“You understood my soul, I thought, and now others are coming only to sack my heart of all its riches. What am I to do? We argued, yes, you and I, but it was with loving respect, was it not? I cannot endure without you. Please come to me, from wherever you are.”

“Well, surely you know. Didn’t you rebel? Don’t you? Why, Leon said of you there is a core in you which no one touches.""Nonsense. I merely know and accept everything. There is no resistance.""But how can it be?""Beauty, you must learn it. You must accept and yield, and then you shall see everything is simple.""I would not be here with you if I yielded because of the Prince...""Yes, you could be here with me. I adore my Queen and I am here with you. I love you both. I yield to that entirely as well as everything else and even the knowledge I may be punished. And when I am punished, I shall dread it, and suffer it and understand it and accept it. Beauty, when you accept you will flower in the pain, you will flower in your suffering.”

“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.”

“Oh, my darling, wish you were here!And my dark soul is happy again, because it does not know how to be anything else for very long, andbecause the pain is a deep dark sea in which I would drown if I did not sail my little craft steadily over thesurface, steadily towards a sun which will never rise.”