Quotes from The Vampire Lestat

“None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“The prince is never going to come. Everyone knows that; and maybe sleeping beauty's dead.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“I never lie," I said offhand. "At least not to those I don't love.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“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.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“I'm Gentleman Death in silk and lace, come to put out the candles. The canker in the heart of the rose.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“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.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“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.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“We breathe the light, we breathe the music, we breathe the moment as it passes through us.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“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.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“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.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“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.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“Words. Borne on the ever swelling current of hatred, like flowers opening in the current, petals peeling back, then falling apart.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“I am an unwilling devil. I cry like some vagrant child. I want to go home.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“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”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“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!”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“Hell's Bells ringing, my secret music...”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“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.
”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“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”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“But the sky was never quite the same shade of blue again.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“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.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“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”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“I stumble through a carnival of horrors”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“an intoxication with forbidden knowledge in which the natural things become unimportant.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“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.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“Who cares? Kingdoms rise and fall. Just don't burn the paintings in the Louvre, that's all.”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

“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?”
― Anne Rice, quote from The Vampire Lestat

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“I suppose that's what happens when you make other people's lives miserable: life gets miserable back at you.”
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“. . . waves of desert heat . . . I must’ve passed out, because when I woke up I was shivering and stars wheeled above a purple horizon. . . . Then the sun came up, casting long shadows. . . . I heard a vehicle coming. Something coming from far away, gradually growing louder. There was the sound of an engine, rocks under tires. . . . Finally it reached me, the door opened, and Dirk Bickle stepped out. . . .

But anyway so Bickle said, “Miracles, Luke. Miracles were once the means to convince people to abandon reason for faith. But the miracles stopped during the rise of the neocortex and its industrial revolution. Tell me, if I could show you one miracle, would you come with me and join Mr. Kirkpatrick?”

I passed out again, and came to. He was still crouching beside me. He stood up, walked over to the battered refrigerator, and opened the door. Vapor poured out and I saw it was stocked with food. Bickle hunted around a bit, found something wrapped in paper, and took a bottle of beer from the door. Then he closed the fridge, sat down on the old tire, and unwrapped what looked like a turkey sandwich.

He said, “You could explain the fridge a few ways. One, there’s some hidden outlet, probably buried in the sand, that leads to a power source far away. I figure there’d have to be at least twenty miles of cable involved before it connected to the grid. That’s a lot of extension cord. Or, this fridge has some kind of secret battery system. If the empirical details didn’t bear this out, if you thoroughly studied the refrigerator and found neither a connection to a distant power source nor a battery, you might still argue that the fridge had some super-insulation capabilities and that the food inside had been able to stay cold since it was dragged out here. But say this explanation didn’t pan out either, and you observed the fridge staying the same temperature week after week while you opened and closed it. Then you’d start to wonder if it was powered by some technology beyond your comprehension. But pretty soon you’d notice something else about this refrigerator. The fact that it never runs out of food. Then you’d start to wonder if somehow it didn’t get restocked while you slept. But you’d realize that it replenished itself all the time, not just while you were sleeping. All this time, you’d keep eating from it. It would keep you alive out here in the middle of nowhere. And because of its mystery you’d begin to hate and fear it, and yet still it would feed you. Even though you couldn’t explain it, you’d still need it. And you’d assume that you simply didn’t understand the technology, rather than ascribe to it some kind of metaphysical power. You wouldn’t place your faith in the hands of some unknowable god. You’d place it in the technology itself. Finally, in frustration, you’d come to realize you’d exhausted your rationality and the only sensible thing to do would be to praise the mystery. You’d worship its bottles of Corona and jars of pickled beets. You’d make up prayers to the meats drawer and sing about its light bulb. And you’d start to accept the mystery as the one undeniable thing about it. That, or you’d grow so frustrated you’d push it off this cliff.”

“Is Mr. Kirkpatrick real?” I asked.

After a long gulp of beer, Bickle said, “That’s the neocortex talking again.”
― Ryan Boudinot, quote from Blueprints Of The Afterlife

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