“Put out the light and then put out the light.”

“Should we put out the light? And then put out the light. But once put out thy light, I cannot give it vital breath again. It needs must wither.”

“I'm Gentleman Death in silk and lace, come to put out the candles. The canker in the heart of the rose.”

“It was the night that the power went out in Berkeley that he'd finished Joyce's Finnegan's Wake by the light of a candle. Sometimes you need to be forced to study what's right in front of you.”

“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.”

“The great adventure of our lives. What does it mean to die when you can live until the end of the world? and what is 'the end of the world' except a phrase, because who knows even what is the world itself? I had now lived in two centuries, seen the illusions of one shattered by the other, been eternally young and eternally ancient, possessing no illusions, living moment to moment in a way that made me picture a silver clock ticking in a void: the painted face, the delicately carved hands looked upon by no one, looking out at no one, illuminated by a light which was not a light, like the light by which god made the world before He had made light. Ticking, ticking, ticking, the precision of the clock, in a room as vast as the universe.”

“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.”