Quotes from Anne Rice

Christmas celebrations in the early colonies to the condemnations today of the commercial nature of the feast.

She said that no system based on arcana or esoteric knowledge would survive this age. No new revealed religion could take hold in it.

Treachery it was, the theft of immortality. A dark Prometheus stealing a luminescent fire. Laughter in the darkness. Laughter echoing in the catacomb. Echoing as if down the centuries.

Strength? What strength! This is a weak, flopping, sloshy, repulsive collection of nerves and ganglia. Don't even mention the word 'strength.

And there were moments on that first night in this fetid little paradise when I prayed that in spite of all my secret power, I was somehow kin to every mortal man. Maybe I was not the exotic outcast that I imagined, but merely the dim magnification of every human soul.

The only power that exists is inside ourselves…

Old truths and ancient magic, revolution and invention, all conspire to distract us from the passion that in one way or another defeats us all.

Yes, you are right, those of us who are known to everyone today are romantics. We are. We are poets. But we are individuals, with an immense faith in the individual and a love of the individual.

We were in Paris. And we were going to live forever.

One can kill the gifts one is given, any of them and all of them, if one is determined to do so, and pride is the parent of destruction; pride eats the mind and the heart and the soul alive.

Who could trust language?

It will never again be what it was. It's a wonder that I didn't foresee the cataclysm, but then I never really envision the finish of anything that I start.

What if the drive to survive was a form of faith, a form of prayer?

You're a mystery the way a sacrament is a mystery.

Her sobs grew worse, more bitter, until finally I bent and kissed her soft neck and cheeks. Winter plums. Plums from an enchanted wood where the fruit never falls from the boughs. Where the flowers never wither and die.

So why must it wound him that the most despairing music is full of beauty? Why must it hurt him and make him cynical and sad and untrusting?

Speak to me of the dark gifts. I use them. I'm gentleman death in silk and lace, come to put out the candle.

All my struggles, my triumphs, my losses, were being eclipsed by what was being revealed now. Had ever ennui and despair been banished by such revelations, such precious gifts of truth?

In the story of the prince and the frog, there's always a frog. This story ... it has no frog.

And there is another kind of strength in you. A daring, and a hunger, and aloneness. And that hunger and aloneness I know, and I kiss with the lips I do not have; I hold with the arms I do not have; I press to the heart in me that isn't there to beat with warmth.

We all need love, don't we, even the worst killers, the worst animals! We all need love.

It is a terrible thing to realize that you depend so much upon another; that your entire sense of well-being is connected to that one—that you need him, love him, that he is the chief witness of your life.

The world of atheism was cracking apart for me, just as once the world of Catholic faith had cracked apart. I was losing my faith in the nonexistence of God.

the shutting of the coffin is always disturbing. It is rather like going under a modern anesthetic on an operating table. Even a casual mistake on the part of an intruder might mean death.