Quotes from Anne Rice

Your cigarette has become one long cylindrical ash.

They said a child had died in the attic. Her clothes had been discovered in the wall. I wanted to go up there, and to lie down near the wall, and be alone. They'd seen her ghost now and then, the child. But none of these vampires could see spirits, really, at least not the way that I could see them. No matter. It wasn't the company of the child I wanted. It was to be in that place.

There are times when one simply cannot say no.

The prince is never going to come, everybody knows that; and maybe Sleeping Beauty's dead.

Some things one doesn't want to remember.

Why don't people do what they really want to do, Reuben?" he asked. "Why do we so often settle for what makes us devoutly unhappy! Why do we accept that happiness just isn't possible?

I watched them with the eyes of a hungry ghost.

He took another quick swallow of the coffee. Tasted awful to him, though it was good coffee, he'd brewed it himself. A beer was what he wanted. Not to have a beer right now was like not breathing. But it was just too great a risk.

Think of it, Armand," I pressed carefully. "Why should Death lurk in the shadows? Why should Death wait at the gate? There is no bedchamber, no ballroom that I cannot enter. Death in the glow of the hearth, Death on tiptoe in the corridor, that is what I am. Speak to me of the Dark Gifts—I use them. I'm Gentleman Death in silk and lace, come to put out the candles. The canker in the heart of the rose.

Dead. things, dead things. . . I said. Come no closer. Talking of madness and love, in this reeking place! And that old monster, Magnus, locking them up in his dungeon. How did he love them, his captives? The way boys love butterflies when they rip off their wings!

boy—before intense anxiety had crushed his chances for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and sent him into the awful mental decline in which he'd been made a vampire.

To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.

He's picked you because you are careless and flamboyant and vain. Oh, I don't say this to hurt you. Truly I don't. You long to be seen and approached and understood and to get into mischief, to stir everything up and see if it won't boil over and if God won't come down and grab you by

My Lasher is powerful beyond your dreams of a daimon, and he has learnt much.' 'Learned,' I repeated in amazement. 'How learned, Deborah, for he is merely a spirit, and they are forever foolish and therein lies the danger, that in granting our wishes they do not understand the complexity of them, and thereby prove our undoing. There are a thousand tales that prove it. Has this not happened? How so do you say learned?

There's always been a demeanor to Mekare

I struck him down for Deborah, and for all the poor and ignorant women I have seen screaming in the flames, for the women who have expired on the rack or in cold prison cells, for the families destroyed and for the villages laid waste by these awful lies.

Treasure the pain; treasure what you have with her, including the fear. Treasure what you may have, including the failure. Treasure it because if we don't live this life, if we don't live it to the fullest year after year and century after century, well, then, we die.

This was that lucid and dangerous state with drinking, when everything began to shimmer; when there was meaning in the grain of the marble; when one could make the most offensive speeches.

Never in all this time since you first came to me, never once have I ever looked into your eyes or heard your voice, or even thought of you, without feeling pain. It's the pain connected to loving you ,to realizing my limits, and what I'll never have. Do you remmeber feeling my heartbeat? You'll never feel such a rhythm as you will with me. I'm your Savage Garden, and yet so tame and soft and safe!

He looked away as if he were again disengaging himself from the present.

The world was one thing, but all people are not of it. Some are better than it, apart from it, more splendid, untouchable and pure.

The Coven of the Articulate—A modern slang term popular among the Undead for the vampires whose stories appear in the Vampire Chronicles—particularly Louis, Lestat, Pandora, Marius, and Armand.

writers had a way of "redeeming everything that ever happens to them.

Five nights ago the Voice had said, "You of all understand me. You of all understand power, the desire for power, what is at the heart of the desire for power." "Which is what?" Rhosh had asked the Voice. "Simple," the Voice had replied. "Those who desire power want to be immune to the power of others.