Quotes from Anne Rice

We were on the Devil's Road together before all this happened," she said. "We'll be on it soon again.

You have a tale to tell, you are ancient, and deeply broken. I feel love for you and cherish that it is what it is and nothing more.

I have learned to live with a profound loneliness. I forget about it for years and years. Then it surfaces, the desire to be placed in context by somebody else. The desire to be known, understood, evaluated morally by a sophisticated mind.

I am not time's fool, nor a god hardened by the millennia; I am not the trickster in the black cape, nor the sorrowful wanderer. I have a conscience. I know right from wrong. I know what I do, and yes, I do it. I am the Vampire Lestat. That's your answer. Do with it what you will.

This is what love is, isn't it? It's not a thing for which you clear a certain space in your life. It takes over your life, and all else must be made to fit to it, or the result is endless grief or a willful numbness that results in the death of your spirit before your body.

But Paris, Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets—as vast and indestructible as nature itself.

I couldn't bear delving into his soul without his knowing it. Yet I couldn't stop myself from sensing a vast secret terrain inside him, grimmer perhaps than I had ever dreamed, and his words came back to me that the darkness in him was like the darkness I'd seen at the inn, and that he tried to conceal it from me.

Evil is a point of view.

What race can live with any other? What religion with any other? War is worldwide; and the wars are tribal, no matter what men say they are! They are tribal, and they are wars of extermination, whether it be the Arabs against the Kurds, or the Turks and the Europeans, or the Russian fighting the Oriental. It's never going to stop. People dream that it will, but it can't, as long as there are people.

I'm theatrical and incorrigible. A regular beast when it comes to the exaggerated and the eccentric.

And everything I see when I look at you is utterly insubstantial. It is a commingling of tiny movements and indefinable colors as if you haven't a body at all, but are a collection of heat and light. You are light itself, and what am I now? Eternal as I am, I curl like a cinder in that blaze.

Because if God does not exist, this life Ã¢â'¬Â¦ every second of it Ã¢â'¬Â¦ is all we have.

Amadeo, the world now is yours," my Master said. "You must look at the larger movements of history.

There was no judgment day, no final explanation, no luminous moment in which all terrible wrongs would be made right, all horrors redeemed. The witches burnt at the stake would never be avenged. No one was ever going to tell us anything!

I wanted darkness. To hide from her and the feelings that welled up in me, and the great consuming fear that I was utterly inadequate to make her happy, or to make myself happy by pleasing her.

It was the darkness exploded, the darkness molten, and the beauty of it was like the glow of smoldering coals; just enough illumination to show how much darkness there really was.

She would have been gorgeous if someone had thrown her into a waterfall and held her there for half an hour and I told her so silently.

Forget you need anyone to love you for what you are. That's impossible. I'm afraid. I'm afraid of what you will do now. The pattern's all too familiar.

Your body's dying...pay no attention

In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art—the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard's canvases—beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.

Good and evil, those are concepts man has made. And man is better, really, than the Savage Garden.

The woman was forty-one years old, yet she looked both ancient and young—a stooped and pale child, untouched by adult worry or passion. Deirdre, did you ever have a lover? Did you ever dance in that parlor?

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. And weary finally of this complexity, we dream of that long-ago time when we sat upon our mother's knee and each kiss was the perfect consummation of desire. What can we do but reach for the embrace that must now contain both Heaven and Hell: our doom again and again and again. —Lestat in The Vampire Lestat

Evil is a point of view. God kills, indiscriminately, and so shall we. He takes the richest and the poorest, as so shall we, for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves