Quotes from Anne Rice

I've lived all these years among those who create nothing and change nothing,' I said. 'Actors and musicians-they're saints to me.

And so this young one, this young one whom I had so loved, I had to forsake, no matter how broken my heart, no matter how lonely my soul, no matter how bruised my intellect and spirit.

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

If you would have fleshly life, human life, hard life which can move through time and space, then fight for it. If you would have human philosophy, then struggle and make yourself wise, so that nothing can hurt you ever. Wisdom is strength. Collect yourself, whatever you are, into something with a purpose.' 

But all morality is of necessity shaped by context. I'm not talking relativism, no. To ignore the context of a decision is in fact immoral.

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.

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.

But I still did not realize how mad she was, and how accustomed to dreaming; and that she would not cry out for reality, rather would feed reality to her dreams

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.

I saw the Light,saw the myriad spirits flying loose up the Tunnel towards the celestial blaze, the Tunnel perfectly round and widening as they rose and for one blessed moment, one blessed tiny instant, the songs of Heaven resounded down the tunnel as if its curves were not made of wind but of something solid that could echo these ethereal songs, and their organized rhythm, their heartbreaking beauty piercing the catastrophic suffering of this place-Lestat

I find at moments I'm as fragile as glass.

Yes.' He drank it all down and then casually threw the glass at the fireplace. I stared at the fragments. 'You don't mind, do you?' He gestured to the broken glass with a sarcastic smile. 'I surely hope you don't, because there's nothing much you can do about it if you do mind.

He imagined his past gone, along with his future. Death was the understanding of the immediate present: that there is finally nothing else.

You are too strong for this rain and too strong for this sorrow.

And time would open up to us and we would be the teachers of one another. All the things that gave you happiness would give me happiness; and I would be the protector of your pain. My power would be your power. My strength the same. But you're dead inside to me, you're cold and beyond reach!

Curses of vanished elders echoed down on me; too pretty, too soft, too pale, eyes far too full of the Devil, ah, that devilish smile

I hear the birds singing. Listen. I hear them in their cage. The others-all our kind who know of her-they think of her as heartless, but she wasn't heartless. She was only aware of things which I didn't learn till so many decades had passed. She knew secrets that only suffering can teach...

Look on the effect of your religions, those movements that have swept up millions with their fantastical claims. Look at what they have done to human history. Look at the wars fought on account of them; look at the persecutions, the massacres. Look at the pure enslavement of reason; look at the price of faith and zeal.

All my life,I've been afraid of things, as a child and a woman must be. I lied about it naturally. I fancied myself a witch and walked in dark streets to punish myself for my doubts. But I knew what it meant to be afraid. And now, in this darkness, I fear nothing. If you were to leave me here, I would feel nothing. I would walk as I am walking now. As a man, you can't know what I mean by what I say.You can't know a woman's vulnerability. You can't know the sense of power that belongs to me now.

People create these extravagant habitats because they have vision, love of beauty, hopes and dreams.

Pamper the mad man.

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.

I wanted to kiss her, she was beautiful again to me. But I dared not risk it. It wasn't only that I would have frightened her, it was that the desire to kill her was almost overpowering. Some fierce purely male instinct in me wanted to claim her now simply because I had claimed her in another way before.

Roman influence seeds itself, sprouting mighty oaks right through the modern forest of computers, digital disks, microviruses and space satellites.