“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
Anne Rice
Born place: in New Orleans, Louisiana, The United States
Born date October 4, 1941
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“It gets to you, life on the streets, even when you know that for the moment at least you have somewhere else to go. It’s like you know it’s waiting, always there, for the time when the reins slip between your fingers. Still,”
― Sharon J. Bolton, quote from Now You See Me
“You can’t ever give people what they want. But you can give them something else. You can give them empathy. You can give them understanding. And that’s a lot, and enough to give.”
― Amanda Palmer, quote from The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help
“doorway. Glory wasn’t quite sure how she knew this was not an ordinary hole in a rock.”
― Tui T. Sutherland, quote from The Hidden Kingdom
“Every man-made thing, be it a chair, a text, or a school, is thought made substance. It is the expression of someone's, or some groups, ideas and beliefs. The two-hundred year old double hung, six light sash window in the wall opposite my desk, out of which I am looking at this moment embodies ideas about houses and how we should live in them, tools, technologies, standards of craftsmanship, nature and much else. It is a material manifestation of the collective consciousness of its time and place channeled through the individuals who commissioned and made it".”
― quote from Why We Make Things and Why It Matters: The Education of a Craftsman
“if, like many people, you tend to be vaguely unhappy much of the time, it can be very helpful to manufacture a feeling of gratitude by simply contemplating all the terrible things that have not happened to you, or to think of how many people would consider their prayers answered if they could only live as you are now. The mere fact that you have the leisure to read this book puts you in very rarefied company. Many people on earth at this moment can’t even imagine the freedom that you currently take for granted.”
― Sam Harris, quote from Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
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