Quotes from Anne Rice

Actors and actresses make magic,' I said. 'They make things happen on the stage; they invent; they create.

Don't cling to reason so desperately in a world of so many horrid contradictions

But the sky was never quite the same shade of blue again. I mean the world looked different forever after, and even in moments of exquisite happiness there was the darkness lurking, the sense of our frailty and our hopelessness.

I think all of us ordinary mortals tend to mythologize people as good-looking as you.

We spend too much time cursing time—time waits for no man, time will tell, oh, the ravages of time, time flies! We don't think about the gift of time. Time gives us the chance to make mistakes and correct them, to regenerate, to grow. Time gives us the chance to forgive, to restore, to do better than we have ever done in the past. Time gives us the chance to be sorry when we fail and the chance to try to discover in ourselves a new heart.

He had never expected death to be this quiet, this secretive, this easy.

Our way–the Western Way–has always been a work in progress. Questions of life and death, good and evil, justice and tragedy–these are never definitively settled, but must be addressed again and again as personal and public worlds shift and change. We hold our morals to be absolutes, but the context of our actions and decisions is forever changing. We are not relativists because we seek to re-evaluate again and again our most crucial moral positions.

When we talk about our lives, long or short, brief and tragic or enduring beyond comprehension, we impose a continuity on them, and that continuity is a lie.

There's a virtue,' Felix said, 'to listening to a reluctant storyteller. You know that he is in fact diving deep for the salvageable truth.

The music as always had a dark sweet luster, but it was more than ever like an endless beginning-a theme ever building to a climax which would never come.

And I loved this moment for all it's pain...We seemed for a moment like two parts of the same thing.

There was something vampiric about. . music. It must have sounded supernatural even to those who don't believe in the supernatural. . .the way harmony could be layered upon harmony until you felt yourself dissolving in the sound. So eloquent of dread it was, this music.

If only we would wake from (these) states of oblivion with some certain sense that there was no mystery to life at all, that cruelty was purely impersonal, but we don't.

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

Roget looked so profoundly timid. What is it like, working for a well-dressed lunatic who pays you triple what anyone else would pay to forget your better judgment?

I tucked my arm under my head and started crying like a child. I was perishing from exhaustion. I was worn and miserable and I loved crying. I couldn't do anything else. I gave in to it fully. I felt that profound release of the utterly grief-stricken. I didn't give a damn who saw or heard. I cried and cried.

But still, even now, to think of it, I feel something akin to that happiness. And I've more reason now than ever to say that happiness is not what I will ever know, or will ever deserve to know. I am not so much in love with happiness. Yet the name Paris makes me feel it.

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.

Genealogy belongs to the rich in human history. The poor rise and fall without leaving a footprint.

But in every family there are bad people, and weak people, and some people who can't or won't withstand the trials of life, and who fail spectacularly. Their guardian angels weep; demons beholding them dance for joy. But only The Maker decides what ultimately happens to them.

You reflect your age differently. You reflect its broken heart.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

Muy pocos seres buscan de verdad el conocimiento en este mundo. Mortales o inmortales, son escasos los que hacen preguntas. Al contrario, casi todos intentan extraer de lo desconocido las respuestas a las que ya han dado forma en sus propias mentes; justificaciones, confirmaciones, formas de consuelo sin las cuales serian incapaces de continuar adelante. Preguntar de verdad es abrir la puerta a un torbellino. La respues puede aniquilar a la vez la pregunta y quien la hace.

So we reach into the raging chaos, and we pluck some small glittering thing, and we cling to it, and tell ourselves it has meaning, and that the world is good, and we are not evil, and we will all go home in the end.