Quotes from Anne Rice

I see love. I see it in the human struggle. I see its undeniable penetration in all that humans have accomplished in their poetry, their painting, their music, their love of one another and refusal to accept suffering as their lot.

But the time of mourning is always the perfect time for nonsense.

In the name of the cross, more injustice has been perpetrated than for any other single cause or emblem or philosophy or creed on Earth.

Music like that could hurt you. It gave you back your disappointment, and your emptiness. It said, Life can be this. Remember this.

Ah, yes, beautiful English bones.

I curse you," and I felt it as if he'd declaimed it. "I offered myself to you at the moment you vanquished me," he said. "Remember that when your dark children strike out at you, when they rise up against you. Remember me.

as the steps of the ancient always do, with

young blood drinker Antoine as the boy had

Don't you see? I said softly. It is a new age. It requires a new evil. And I am that new evil. I paused, watching him. I am the vampire for these times.

La gente que cesa de creer en dios o en la bondad todavía suele creer en el demonio. No sé por qué. O sí lo sé: la maldad es siempre posible, la bondad es una dificultad eterna.

It seemed at moments, when I sat alone in the dark stateroom, that the sky had come down the meet the sea and some great secret was to be revealed.

I picture heaven as a vast library, with unlimited volumes to read. And paintings and statues to examine galore. I picture it as a great doorway to learning. Do you think the hereafter could be like that?

Dear God, this is love. This is desire. And all my past amours have been but the shadow of this.

I saw my life as if I stood apart from it, the vanity, the self-serving, the constant fleeing from one petty annoyance after another, the lip service to God and the Virgin and a host of saints whose names filled my prayer books, none of whom made the slightest difference in a narrow, materialistic, and selfish existence. I saw my real gods...the gods of most men. Food, drink, and security in conformity.

We alone understand the passage of time and the value of every minute of human life. And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would have died tomorrow or the day after or eventually … it doesn't matter. Because if God does not exist, this life … every second of it … is all we have.

You see, sometimes, Alex, we have to lose things to learn compassion. And sometimes we are overcome by change that arrives with some measure of violence, but leaves us transformed for the better.

God kills, and so shall we...

And I would see her sweet and palpable before me, a shimmering, precious creature soon to grow old, soon to die, soon to lose these moments that in their intangibility promised to us wrongly... wrongly, an immortality. As if it were our very birthright, which we could not come to grasp the meaning of until this time of middle life when we looked on only as many years ahead as already lay behind us. When every moment, every moment must be first known and then savored.

You reach deep down and bring up what feels absolutely authentic to you as you move along with the book, but you don't know everything about it. You can't.

Well, I am no village cunning woman, no frightened merry-begot, but a woman born to riches, and educated from the time I can remember, and given all that I could possibly desire. And now in my twenty-second year, already a mother and soon perhaps to be a widow, I rule in this place. I ruled before my mother gave to me all her secrets, and her great familiar, Lasher, and I mean to study this thing, and make use of it, and allow it to enhance my considerable strength.

There is no heaven. There is no hell. There is no above or below. If there is a realm beyond this one, it is no more beautiful, no more significant, no more full of truth, than ours here on earth.

Pick one tree; describe it, if you will, in terms of what it destroys, what it defies, and what it does not accomplish, and you have a monster of greedy roots and irresistible momentum that eats the light of other plants, their nutrients, their air. But that is not the truth of the tree. That is not the whole truth when the thing is seen as part of nature, and by nature I mean nothing sacred, I mean only the full tapestry, Akasha. I mean only the larger thing which embraces all.

Get thee behind me, tragedy. Kneeling over her, he lifted her and impaled her gently on his sex.

I have named them the hounds of Sisyphus.