“None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are.”
“The prince is never going to come. Everyone knows that; and maybe sleeping beauty's dead.”
“I never lie," I said offhand. "At least not to those I don't love.”
“Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds -- justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can't go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.”
“I'm Gentleman Death in silk and lace, come to put out the candles. The canker in the heart of the rose.”
“To be godless is probably the first step to innocence," he said, "to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost."
So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions."
An absence of need for illusions," he said. "A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes.”
“A singer can shatter glass with the proper high note," he said, "but the simplest way to break glass is simply to drop it on the floor.”
“We breathe the light, we breathe the music, we breathe the moment as it passes through us.”
“Oh, my darling, wish you were here!
And my dark soul is happy again, because it does not know how to be anything else for very long, and
because the pain is a deep dark sea in which I would drown if I did not sail my little craft steadily over the
surface, steadily towards a sun which will never rise.”
“As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that.”
“Do devils love each other? Do they walk arm in arm in hell saying, “Ah, you are my friend, how I love you,” things like that to each other?...it was a matter of a concept of evil, wasn't it? All creatures in hell are supposed to hate one another, as all the saved hate the damned, without reservation.”
“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.”
“Words. Borne on the ever swelling current of hatred, like flowers opening in the current, petals peeling back, then falling apart.”
“I am an unwilling devil. I cry like some vagrant child. I want to go home.”
“You sense my loneliness, (...) my bitterness at being shut out of life. My bitterness that I'm evil, that I don't deserve to be loved and yet I need love hungrily. My horror that I can never reveal myself to mortals. But these things don't stop me, Mother. I'm too strong for them to stop me. As you said yourself once, I am very good at being what I am. These things merely now and then make me suffer, that's all”
“One will hate you for taking his life, another will run to excesses that you scorn. A third will emerge mad and raving, another a monster you cannot control. One will be jealous of your superiority, another shut you out... And the veil will always come down between you Make a legion, you will be, always and forever alone!”
“Hell's Bells ringing, my secret music...”
“No one is safe from nature's savagery,not even the innocent. Only beauty is consistent.
Gabrielle envisions a time when the Savage Garden will overtake civilizations and destroy it.
”
“Yet I saw crypts when I looked at him, and I heard the beat of kettledrums. I saw torchlit fields where I had never been, heard vague incantations, felt the heat of raging fires on my face. And they didn't come out of him, these visions. Rather I drew them out on my own.
Yet I never had Nicolas, mortal or immortal, been so alluring. Never had Gabrielle held me so in thrall.
Dear God, this is love. This is desire. And all my past amours have been but the shadow of this."
— Lestat de Lioncourt”
“But the sky was never quite the same shade of blue again.”
“I didn't want to be in hell, even for a moment. I sure as hell wasn't going there just to spit in the face of the Prince of Darkness, whoever he might be!
On the contrary, if I was a damned thing, then let the son of a bitch come for me! Let him tell me why I was mean to suffer. I would truly like to know.
As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that.”
“I don't believe in anything, Mother," I said. "You told Armand long ago that you believe you'll find answers in the great jungles and forests; that the stars will finally reveal a vast truth. But I don't believe in anything. And that makes me stronger than you think”
“I stumble through a carnival of horrors”
“an intoxication with forbidden knowledge in which the natural things become unimportant.”
“All the stories I have told you are finally as useless as all ancient knowledge is to man and to us. Its images and its poetry can be beautiful; it can make us shiver with the
recognition of things we have always suspected or felt. It can draw us back to times when the earth was new to man, and wondrous. But always we come back to the way the earth is now.”
“Who cares? Kingdoms rise and fall. Just don't burn the paintings in the Louvre, that's all.”
“It's not so," I said. "And how long do you think it will sustain you, feeling and seeing and touching and tasting, if there is no love? No one with you?”
“Must I accept the barren Gift?
-learn death, and lose my Mastery?
Then let them know whose blood and breath
will take the Gift and set them free:
whose is the voice and whose the mind
to set at naught the well-sung Game-
when finned Finality arrives
and calls me by my secret Name.
Not old enough to love as yet,
but old enough to die, indeed-
-the death-fear bites my throat and heart,
fanged cousin to the Pale One's breed.
But past the fear lies life for all-
perhaps for me: and, past my dread,
past loss of Mastery and life,
the Sea shall yet give up Her dead!
Lone Power, I accept your Gift!
Freely I make death a part of me;
By my accept it is bound
into the lives of all the Sea-
yet what I do now binds to it
a gift I feel of equal worth:
I take Death with me, out of Time,
and make of it a path, a birth!
Let the teeth come! As they tear me,
they tear Your ancient hate for aye-
-so rage, proud Power! Fail again,
and see my blood teach Death to die!”
“Grief was just the moment before you tied the thread and began the next one”
“Kinship– not serving the other, but being one with the other. Jesus was not “a man for others”; he was one with them. There is a world of difference in that.”
“...because in a way it happened to someone else. I don't really speak that person's language anymore, and when I think about her, she embarrasses me sometimes, but I don't want to forget her, I don't want to pretend she never existed. So before I start forgetting, I have to get down exactly who she was, and exactly how she felt about everything. She was me a lot longer than I've been me so far.”
“I'm tired of this. It's like, just when I think our goal is within reach, it slips right through our fingers. It's happened time and again. Now, when we finally in our grasp, the truth slaps us in the face.”
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