Anno Dracula

There will never be slaves in Britain,' Godalming continued, 'but those who stay warm will naturally serve us, as the excellent Bessie has just served me. Have a care, lest you wind up the equivalent of some damned regimental water-bearer.' In India, I knew a water-bearer who was a better man than most.

Good things come to an end, bad things have to be stopped.

Quite a few vampires, especially the elders, regarded those who creep through graveyard shadows in batwing capes and fingerless black gloves as an Edinburgh gentleman might look upon a Yankee with a single Scots grandparent who swathes himself in kilts and tartan sashes, prefaces every remark with quotes from Burns or Scott and affects a fondness for bagpipes and haggis.

Love is always a species of insanity. If

Impaler,’ she declared, ‘I have no equal.

Quería destruir a un monstruo, no convertirme yo en uno

Relevance, Wilde once explained, was a careless habit that should not be over-indulged.

Power is based, at bottom, on the ability to kill; thus the means of killing have to be available, even if only to a select few.

W ere you aware,’ began Lord Ruthven, ‘that there are people in these isles whose sole objection to the marriage of our dear Queen – Victoria Regina, Empress of India, et cetera – to Vlad Dracula – known as Tepes, quondam Prince of Wallachia – is that the happy bridegroom happened once to be, in a fashion I shan’t pretend to understand, a Roman Catholic?

Nunc scio quid sit Amor,’ he quoted from Virgil. At last I know what Love is like.

God, the vampire women! What a pack of foaming she-cats!

Marvellous apparatuses, like miracle cures, are beset with unpredictable side-effects. In the twentieth century, new means of setting down human thought may precipitate an avalanche of worthless digression.

-La plata y la estaca me romperán el corazón, mas los hombres jamás me herirán.

Places, she told herself, were not evil: they were what people made of them.