“Come on, say it again. I'm a perfect devil. Tell me how bad I am. It makes me feel so good!”
“Goddamn it, do it yourself. You’re five hundred years old and you can’t use a telephone? Read the directions. What are you, an immortal idiot?”
“I can’t help being a gorgeous fiend. It’s just the card I drew.”
“Keep your secrets
Keep your silence
It is a better gift than truth”
“It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words.”
“There are too many other inexplicable things around us--horrors, threats, mysteries that draw you in and then inevitably disenchant you. Back to the predictable and humdrum. The prince is never going to come, everybody knows that; and maybe Sleeping Beauty's dead.”
“It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words. That is, if it doesn't destroy us, if it doesn't burn away the optimism and the spirit, the capacity for visions, and the respect for simple yet indispensable things.”
“I’d thought I knew what beauty was in women; but she’d surpassed all the language I had for it.”
“Yes, I know," "And I love to hear you say it, Louis. I need to hear you say it. I don't think anyone will ever say it quite like you do. Come on, say it again. I'm a perfect devil. Tell me how bad I am. It makes me feel so good!”
“You're a perfect devil, Lestat!" "That's what you are! You are the devil himself!”
“Amazing what the British do with language; the nuances of politeness. The world's great diplomats, surely.”
“In the flesh,” Maharet said. “In the flesh all wisdom begins. Beware the thing that has no flesh. Beware the gods, beware the idea, beware the devil.”
“History is a litany of injustice, no one denies it. But when has a simple solution ever been anything but evil? Only in complexity do we find answers. Through complexity men struggle towards fairness; it is slow and clumsy, but it's the only way. Simplicity demands too great a sacrifice. It always has." - Lestat”
“It is not man who is the enemy of the human species. It is the irrational; it is the spiritual when it is divorced from the material; from the lesson in one beating heart or one bleeding vein.”
“[...] so important to believe in a concept of goodness, even if we make it up ourselves. We don't really make it up. it's there, isn't it?"
"Oh, yes, it's there," she said. "It's there because we put it there.”
“I've always been my own teacher. And I must confess I've been my favorite pupil a well.”
“I tell you, we would be hard put to determine what is more evil -- religion or the pure idea. The intervention of the supernatural or the elegant abstract solution! Both have bathed this earth in suffering; both have brought the human race literally and figuratively to its knees.”
“But don't you see, all human decisions are made like this. Do you think the mother knows what will happen to the child in her womb? Dear God, we are lost, I tell you. What does it matter if you give it to me and it's wrong! There is no wrong! There is only desperation, and I would have it! I want to live forever with you.”
“It was haunted; but real hauntings have nothing to do with ghosts finally; they have to do with the menace of memory.”
“And you must know we do not really change over time; we are as flowers unfolding, we merely become more nearly ourselves.”
“you do get wiser when you live for hundreds of years; but you also have more time to turn out as badly as your enemies always said you might.”
“He imagined his past gone, along with his future. Death was the understanding of the immediate present: that there is finally nothing else.”
“Akasha, for two thousand years I have watched,' he said. 'Call me the Roman in the Arena if you will and tell me tales of the ages that went before. When I knelt at your feet I begged you for your knowledge. But what I have witnessed in this short span has filled me with awe and love for all things mortal; I have seen revolutions in thought and philosophy which I believed impossible. Is not the human race moving towards the very age of peace you describe?'
Her face was a picture of disdain.
'Marius,' she said, 'this will go down as one of the bloodiest centuries in the history of the human race. What revolutions do you speak of, when millions have been exterminated by one small European nation on the whim of a madman, when entire cities were melted into oblivion by bombs? When children in desert countries of the East war on other children in the name of an ancient and despotic God? Marius, women the world over wash the fruits of their wombs down public drains. The screams of the hungry are deafening, yet unheard by the rich who cavort in technological citadels; disease runs rampant among the starving of whole continents while the sick in palatial hospitals spend the wealth of the world on cosmetics refinements and the promise of eternal life through pills and vials." She laughed softly. 'Did ever the cries of the dying ring so thickly in the ears of those of us who can hear them? Has ever more blood been shed?”
“It does not matter what it is; it matters how much there is of it; that all around the oases of your shining Western cities it exists; it is three-fourths of the world! Open your ears, my darling; listen to thier prayers; listen to the silence of those who've learned to pray for nothing. For nothing has always been their portion, whatever the name of their nation, thier city, their tribe.”
“There is a horrifying loneliness at work in this time. No, listen to me. We lived six and seven to a room in those days, when I was still among the living. The city streets were seas of humanity; and now in these high buildings dim-witted souls hover in luxurious privacy, gazing through the television window at a faraway world of kissing and touching. It is bound to produce some great fund of common knowledge, some new level of human awareness, a curious skepticism, to be so alone.”
“Look on the effect of your religions, those movements that have swept up millions with their fantastical
claims. Look at what they have done to human history. Look at the wars fought on account of them; look at
the persecutions, the massacres. Look at the pure enslavement of reason; look at the price of faith and zeal.”
“Lestat, you are the damnedest creature!' he whispered under his breath. 'You are a brat prince.”
“But let me be a lover in the Savage Garden with you, and the light that went out of life would come back in a great burst of glory. Out of mortal flesh I would pass into eternity. I would be one of you.” - Daniel”
“You painted armless beings, swimming in blinding color, and they had to exist like that forever. Could they see you with all those tiny, scattered eyes? Or did they only see the heaven and hell of their own shining realm, anchored to the studs in the wall by a piece of twisted wire?”
“When you raise an animal, you live it like your own child.”
“Douglas’s fridge was a stainless-steel masterpiece. I’m not that into appliances or anything, but this one was nice and probably cost more than my last apartment. I had the strange desire to hug it every time I came into the kitchen.”
“Relationship Principle 9
Every guy knows he can find a girl who is simply satisfied with satisfying him. They are much more turned on by a woman who cares about her own pleasure as well.”
“A zing travels up my arm from the contact. My nostrils flare, and I catch a whiff of her female scent. She may not wear perfume, but there’s a bewitching essence to her that ensnares my senses.”
“The sort of decision arrived at by saints and madmen is not revealed to others. It is forged little by little, in the folds of the spirit, tangential to reason, shielded from indiscreet eyes, not seeking the approval of others—who would never grant it—until it is at last put into practice. I imagine that in the process—the conceiving of a project and its ripening into action—the saint, the visionary, or the madman isolates himself more and more, walling himself up in solitude, safe from the intrusion of others.”
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