Quotes from Anne Rice

It has its dark splendor, to walk the nightmare terrain forever.

The fans, the vampire groupies, love the idea of this androgynous, preternatural figure stalking the night, and craving aesthetic pleasure just as he craves blood, wearing only the best velvet clothes, and savoring red roses.

That's the case with most vampires, no matter who says otherwise. Beauty carries us to our doom. Or, to put it more accurately, we are made immortal by those who cannot sever themselves from our charms.

In his refusal to believe in anything supernatural or inherently evil, he was as unrealistic as an old voodoo queen who sees spirits everywhere.

In a low voice, I told her many things in English, only using French when for some reason I couldn't find the word I wanted, rambling on about the France of my time, and the crude little colony of New Orleans where I had existed after, and how wondrous this age was, and how I'd become a rock star for a brief time, because I thought that as a symbol of evil I'd do some good.

That was the test of love, he thought dreamily, when you can't bear to be this happy without the other person with you.

everything a man does is part of the moral fabric of who he is, and what he is.

we are blessed to be tiny beings in this universe. We are blessed to feel momentous because we are larger than these grains of sand.

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.

I'll tell you, but you'll never understand. You're on the wrong side of the dark glass. Only the dead know how terrible it is to be alive.

There were many markings in pencil, and those strange symbols again, dashed off, it seemed, revealing their opacity what a complex and abstract thing written language is.

The explanation of evil is a hell of a lot more disappointing than that. It's blunders, people making blunders, whether it's raiding a village and killing all the inhabitants, or killing a child in a fit of rage. Mistakes. Everything is simply a matter of mistakes.

If you could see yourself, hear your own voice, your music. . you wouldn't see darkness. . you'd see an illumination that is all your own. . light and beauty come together in you in a thousand different patterns.

You killed them, Reuben. You killed them in their sins! You terminated their destiny on this earth. You snatched from them any chance for repentance, for redemption. You took that from them. You took it all, Reuben. You snuffed out forever the years of reparation they might have lived! You took life itself from them and you took it from their descendants, and yes, even from their victims, you took what their amends might have been.

To be human, that's what most of us long for. It is the human which has become myth to us.

He had grieved for me, I'll give him that much. But then he is so good at grieving! He wears woe as others wear velvet; sorrow flatters him like the light of candles; tears become him like jewels.

I was no conscious chronicler or witness of the events that unfolded in those times. Surely you understand. You must understand. Do you look thousands of years into the future? Do you measure what's happening to you now by what may matter a thousand years hence? I was stumbling and lurching, groping and from time to time drowning, as any man might.

I don't need to sleep to play. I'm crazy anyway. Being crazier still could only help.

I don't know whether I'm the hero or the victim of this tale. But either way, shouldn't I dominate it? I'm the one really telling it, after all.

When did this fiend strike last? Ah . . . The last report was from the Dominican Republic. That was, let me see, two nights ago. Dominican Republic! Why in the world would he go there? Exactly what I would like to know.

I tell you, Richard, if you ever get ready to sell your soul, don't bother to sell it to another human being. It's bad business to even consider such a thing.

It's always been pride. The History of the Mayfair Witches was pride. But this came to me wrapped in the mysteries of science. We have such a terrible, terrible misconception of science. We think it involves the definite, the precise, the known; it is a horrid series of gates to an unknown as vast as the universe; which means endless. And I knew this, I knew but I forgot. That was my mistake.

With his finger curled under his lip, his elbow on the arm of the couch, he merely studied me as I recounted the memories, and now he was eager for the tale to go on.

It struck me, sharp and hard, that I had been given so many chances to save my soul that my entire life had been constructed around these chances! That was my nature - going from temptation to temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed.