Quotes
 I was seven years old. What do you know when you're seven years old? All my life, or so I thought, we'd been in the city of Alexandria, in the Street of the Carpenters, with the other Galileans, and sooner or later we were going home.- 'I saw it,' said James. 'I saw it when he made the sparrows out of clay on the Sabbath. The teacher told him he shouldn't do such things on the Sabbath. Jesus looked at the birds and they turned into real birds. They flew away. You saw it too. He killed Eleazer, Mother, I saw it.'
- 'I see . . .' said the vampire thoughtfully, and slowly he walked across the room towards the window. [first line]
- Evil is a point of view. God kills indiscriminately and so shall we. For no creatures under God are as we are, none so like him as ourselves.
- People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don't know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.
- Vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires ... How avant-garde!
- Your quest is for darkness only. This sea is not your sea. The myths of men are not your myths. Men's treasures are not yours.
- 'Good? What are you talking about, 'Good'?'
- The truth is most women are weak, be they mortal or immortal. But when they are strong, they are absolutely unpredictable.
- I want to know, for example, why beauty exists,' she [Gabrielle] said, 'why nature continues to contrive it, and what is the link between the life of a lightning storm with the feelings these things inspire in us? If God does not exist, if these things are not unified into one metaphorical system, then why do they retain for us such symbolic power? Lestat calls it the Savage Garden, but for me that is not enough.
- Doesn't matter now, devils who paint angels.
- Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past.
- To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.
- I'm the Vampire Lestat. Remember me? The vampire who became a super rock star, the one who wrote the autobiography? The one with the blond hair and the blue eyes, and the insatiable desire for visibility and fame? You remember. [first line]
- Tell me how bad I am... it makes me feel so good. [Last line]
- The Vampire Lestat here. I have a story to tell you. It's about something that happened to me. [first line/intro]
- The young know how truly difficult and dreadful youth can be. Their youth is wasted on everyone else, that's the horror. The young have no authority, no respect.
- Centuries ago, when I first stood on that little boulevard stage in Paris-when I saw the happy faces, when I heard applause- I felt as if my body and soul had found their destiny; I felt as if every promise in my birth and childhood had begun its fulfillment at last.
- 'Of course I deserve it,' I said, stroking Mojo. 'That's the simplest thing about dealing with me, apparently. I always deserve the worst! The worst disloyalty, the worst betrayal, the worst abandonment! Lestat the scoundrel. Well, they have left this scoundrel entirely on his own.'
- 'We would make our heroes shallow,' he answered, the words very slow and almost sad. 'We would make them brittle. It is they who must remind us of the true meaning of strength.' (David Talbot)
- Maybe that's what Hell is. You go mad. And all your demons come and get you just as fast as you can think them up.
- The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass.
- Roman influence seeds itself, sprouting mighty oaks right through the modern forest of computers, digital disks, microviruses and space satellites.
- You do have a story inside you; it lies articulate and waiting to be written -- behind your silence and your suffering.
- But reason was only a created thing, imposed with faith upon the world, and the stars promise nothing to no one.
- No matter how long we exist, we have our memories. Points in time which time itself cannot erase. Suffering may distort my backward glances, but even to suffering, some memories will yield nothing of their beauty or their splendor. Rather they remain as hard as gems.
- 'Oh my precocious one,' she said. 'You never fail to charm me. Bisexual is it, how Byronic and charming. Doesn't that double's one's chances for love? I'm so delighted.'
- 'No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don't you think? The young are eternally desperate,' he said frankly. 'And books, they offer one hope - that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.
- 'Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a dangerous enemy indeed.'
- 'This book (Christ The Lord: Out Of Egypt) means more to me than anything I've ever done, I'm not offering agnostic explanations. He is real. He worked miracles. He is the Son of God! And there is so much more to write.'
- 'Anyone can write a book about an off-the-wall Jesus, a magician. That's easy. But if we really believe the angel came to Mary, that there were shepherds, what was it like? It was more and more exciting to think about.'
- 'Christians have been arguing with each other for 2,000 years. : What I hope for is that we can love one another, no matter how much we disagree; that we can embrace one another, no matter how tough the arguing becomes. : If we love, we can overcome much of what divides us as people.'
- To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.
- We're frightened of what makes us different.
- The truth is, laughter always sounds more perfect than weeping. Laughter flows in a violent riff and is effortlessly melodic. Weeping is often fought, choked, half strangled, or surrendered to with humiliation.
- I got to the point where the vampire began describing his brother's death, and the whole thing just exploded! Suddenly, in the guise of Louis, a fantasy figure, I was able to touch the reality that was mine. It had something to do with growing up in New Orleans, this strange, decadent city full of antebellum houses. It had something to do with my old-guard Catholic background. It had something to do with the tragic loss of my daughter and with the death of my mother when I was fourteen. Through Louis' eyes, everything became accessible. But I didn't ask when I was writing what it meant; I only asked if it felt authentic. There was an intensity--an intensity that's still there when I write about those characters. As long as it is there, I will go on with them. In some way they are a perfect metaphor for me.
- To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.
- I like mainly to be invisible, to sort of drift around unseen in the world.
- I was particularly stunned by the casting of [Tom] Cruise, who is no more my Vampire Lestat than Edward G. Robinson is Rhett Butler.
- A writer can't know everything about what she writes. It's impossible. You reach deep down and you 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.
- Once I returned to the Church and began to see the universe as a place that really did incorporate redemption and really tried to understand the implications of there being a God, my identification with the vampires as outcasts, as outsiders and lost souls began to totally wane. It no longer worked for me. I had done it. It had led me to this point.
- I promised that from now on I would write only for the Lord.
anne rice
|
