I never lie," I said offhand. "At least not to those I don't love.

Oh to have you with me, to have you here, not to be alone, but to be with you, my beauty, you of all souls! You.

It was as if when I looked into his eyes I was standing alone on the edge of the world...on a windswept ocean beach. There was nothing but the soft roar of the waves.

The world changes, we do not, therein lies the irony that kills us.

I was good and bad, but never wicked.

Do you know what I think about crying? I think some people have to learn to do it. But once you learn, once you know how to really cry, there's nothing quite like it. I feel sorry for those who don't know the trick. It's like whistling or singing.

Truth is a risky proposition. It's the nature of mediocre human beings to believe that lies are necessary, that they serve a purpose, that truth is subversive, that candor is dangerous, that the very scaffold of communal life is supported by lies.

People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil... Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.

How could anyone love Him? What did you just tell me yourself about the world? Don't you see, everybody hates God now. It's not that God is dead in the twentieth century. It's that everybody hates Him! At least I think so.

I saw my real gods . . the gods of most men. Food, drink, and security in conformity.

Não importava que Deus no céu fosse católico, protestante ou hindu. O que importava era uma coisa mais profunda, mais antiga e mais forte do que qualquer imagem dessas: um conceito do bem baseado na afirmação da vida, na repulsa à destruição, à perversidade, ao uso e abuso do homem pelo homem. Era a afirmação do humano e do natural.

The Maker offers us creation itself as proof of his greatness.

Would that death were like this. Would that one would sleep and sleep and sleep forever.

And books, they offer one hope -- that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.

Oh Lestat, you deserved everything that's ever happened to you. You better not die. You might actually go to hell.

Merciful death. How you love your precious guilt

The spirit who inhabits her animates us all. Destroy the host, you destroy the power. The young die first; the old wither slowly; the eldest perhaps would go last. But she is the Queen of the Damned, and the Damned can't live without her.

I was just walking around saying “We’re all gonna die!” I never got over it. I went to class, I did what I had to do, but I was a gibbering idiot. It never went away. I never again felt the same way about life and death.

Go where the pain is, go where the pleasure is.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

The atheism and nihilism of my earlier years now seems shallow, and even a bit cocky.

Maybe a new religion will rise now. Maybe without it, man will crumble in cynicism and selfishness because he really needs his gods.

As the Roman Empire came to its close, all the old gods of the pagan world were seen as demons by the Christians who rose. It was useless to tell them as the centuries passed that their Christ was but another God of the Wood, dying and rising, as Dionysus or Osiris had done before him, and that the Virgin Mary was in fact the Good Mother again enshrined. Theirs was a new age of belief and conviction, and in it we became devils, detached from what they believed, as old knowledge was forgotten or misunderstood.

We all suffer under a curse, the curse that we know more than we can endure, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing we can do about the force and the lure of this knowledge.

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.

Knowledge drifts in and out of my mind", said Lestat with a little look of honest distress and a shake of his head. "I devour it and then I lose it and sometimes I can't reach for any knowledge that I ought to possess. I feel desolate, but then knowledge returns or I seek it out in a knew source."(...)"But you love books, then", Aunt Queen was saying. I had to listen."Oh, yes," Lestat said. "Sometimes they're the only thing that keeps me alive.""What a thing to say at your age", she laughed."No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don't you think? The young are eternally desperate," he said frankly. "And books, they offer one hope - that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.

I congratulate myself on not having arrived into the world until the present time. This age suits my taste.

...what was the good of being a movie werewolf? You howled at the moon; you couldn't remember what you did, and then somebody shot you.

We have such a terrible, terrible misconception of science. We think it involves the definite, the precise, the known; it is a horrid series of gates to an unknown as vast as the universe; which means endless.

But you love books, then,” Aunt Queen was saying. I had to listen.“Oh, yes,” Lestat said. “Sometimes they are the only thing that keeps me alive.”“What a strange thing to say at your age,” she laughed.“No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don’t you think? The young are eternally desperate,” he said frankly. “And books, they offer one hope —- that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that new universe, one is saved.

What is written beneath this heavy handsome book cover will count, so sayeth this cover…

….it was a brave man’s fear. I knew what he meant. What must a brave general feel when he knows the battle has gone against him and nothing remains but death?

What is fear after all? It is indecision. You seek some way to resist, escape. There is none.

All my life,I've been afraid of things, as a child and a woman must be. I lied about it naturally. I fancied myself a witch and walked in dark streets to punish myself for my doubts. But I knew what it meant to be afraid.

when we are weary, we speak lovingly of dreams as if they embodied our true deisres-What we WOULD have when that which we DO have so sorely disappoints us

And oh, how she pitched herself into things. She would draw pictures all day long for weeks on end, then throw out the pencils and never draw another thing. Then it was embroidery with her, she had to learn it, and she'd make the most beautiful thing, fussing at herself for the least little mistake, then throw down the needles and be done with that forevermore. I never saw a child so changeable. It was as though she was looking for something to which she could give herself, and she never found it. Least ways not while she was a little girl.

I am such a bad girl," she thought. Yet...

I think this is a very important thing to understand about Christianity. It was from its very beginnings, it seems, a religion of great quarrels and wars, and it wooed the power of temporal authorities, and made them part of itself in the hope of resolving through sheer force its many arguments.

The finest thing under the sun and moon is the human soul. I marvel at the small miracles of kindness that pass between humans, I marvel at the growth of conscience, at the persistence of reason in the face of all superstition or despair. I marvel at human endurance.

Who said you had to be human to have a soul? Everything that is self-conscious and capable of thought and love has a soul. The soul emanates from self-conscious. The soul is the expression of self-consciousness. The soul is generated by organized self-consciousness.

Your soul is your inner being, your thinking, reasoning, loving, choosing inner being. Your capacity to stand up for what is right. Your capacity to fight against what is wrong. Your capacity to choose even to die for what you believe is right. That's your soul.

I'll write about my past but I won't talk about it. I'll turn it into art if I can, but I won't talk about it.

As if the night had said to me, ‘You are the night and the night alone understands you and enfolds you in its arms’ One with the shadows. Without nightmare. An inexplicable peace.

A summer rain had left the night clean and sparkling with drops of water. I leaned against the end pillar of the gallery, my head touching the soft tendrils of a jasmine which grew there in a constant battle with a wisteria, and I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another.

It seems an insult to the night to speak of purpose and intent, when this common moment is so brimming full of blessed design tranquility. All things follow their course.

If you really want peace in any world you have to learn to say nothing.

And then it was, that grief and pain made themselves known to me as never before. Note this, because I knew the full absurdity of Fate and Fortune and Nature more truly than a human can bear to know it. And perhaps the description of this, brief as it is, may give consolation to another. The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass. The truth is, you cannot prepare anyone for this, nor convey an understanding of it through language. It must be known. And this I would wish on no one in the world.

And this time as the lashes come, try to think about the pain, instead of against it, because there is not one single aspect of life, past, present, or future, that does not tear your reason from you, to think on it. So think about the pain. This pain after all has its limits. You can chart its passage through your body. It has a beginning, middle, end. Imagine if it had a color. The first cut of the lash is what, red? Red, spreading into a brilliant yellow. And this one again, red, red, no yellow, and then white, white, white, white. . .Why have you incarcerated yourself in this palazzo of torture chambers, why do you not leave this place? Because you are a monster and this is a school for monsters, and if you leave here, then you will be completely, completely alone! Alone with this!Don't weep in front of these strangers. Swallow it down. Don't weep in front of these strangers! Cry to heaven, cry to heaven, cry to heaven.

The music as always had a dark sweet luster, but it was more than ever like an endless beginning-a theme ever building to a climax which would never come.

I've lived all these years among those who create nothing and change nothing,' I said. 'Actors and musicians-they're saints to me.

And this notion of the meaninglessness of our lives here began to enflame us.I took up the theme again that music and acting were good because they drove back chaos. Chaos was the meaninglessness of day-to-day life, and if we were to die now, our lives would have been nothing but meaninglessness.

The human heart is my school.

Don't be a fool for the Devil, darling.

It was as if this night were only one of thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into into night to make a great arching line of which I couldn't see the end, a night in which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars.

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!

Three generations before I was the one meant for the necklace. I saw him when I was three years old, so clear and strong that he could slip his warm hand in mine, he could lift me in theair, yes, lift my body, but I refused him. I turned my back on him. I told him, You go back to the hell from which you came. And I used my power to fight him.

It has its dark splendor, to walk the nightmare terrain forever.

Because if it's really true that there's no order, then anything can happen to us. Anything at all. There's no real natural law, no right and wrong that's immutable, and the world is suddenly a savage place where any number of things can go wrong.

I am in love with you', I responded.He laughed the most beguiling and gentle laugh.'Of course you are,' he replied. 'I understand perfectly because I'm in love with myself. The fact that I'm not transfixed in front of the nearest mirror takes a great deal of self-control.'It was my turn to laugh.

No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don’t you think? The young are eternally desperate,” he said frankly. “And books, they offer hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe one is saved.

Ah, but prophecies have a way of fulfilling themselves,' Khayman said. 'That's the magic of it. We all understood it in ancient times. The power of charms is the power of the will; you might say that we were all geniuses of psychology in those dark days, that we could be slain by the power of another's designs. And the dreams, Marius, the dreams are but a part of the great design.

To die or not to die, that is the question; it is nobler to live in torment and rage than not to live at all?

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

Resignation requires will, and will requires decision, and decision requires belief, and belief requires that there is something to believe in!

First time my master’s in English literature ever proved useful.

How pathetic it is to describe these things which can't truly be described.

And he would listen, making only a few comments, always sympathetic, so that when I left him I had the distinct impression he had solved everything for me.

You have a light in you that’s almost blinding. But in me there’s only darkness. Sometimes I think it’s like the darkness that infected you that night in the inn when you began to cry and to tremble. You were so helpless, so unprepared for it. I try to keep the darkness from you because I need your light. I need it desperately, but you don’t need the darkness.

What if the drive to survive was a form of faith, a form of prayer?

There is one purpose to life and one only: to bear witness to and understand as much as possible of the complexity of the world -- its beauty, its mysteries, its riddles. The more you understand, the more you look, the greater is your enjoyment of life and your sense of peace. That's all there is to it. Everything else is fun and games. If an activity is not grounded in "to love" or "to learn" it does not have value.

But Marchent, most journalists can’t be trusted. You do know that, don’t you?

Sometimes it seems that light can transform anything! That it is an undeniable and irreducible metaphor for grace. But do the people of the ranchitos know this? Is it for beauty that they do it? Or do they merely want a comfortable illumination in their little shacks?It doesn't matter.We can't stop ourselves from making beauty. We can't stop the world.

She had learnt a painful lesson, she thought – that as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.

Sadness, it was such an arresting emotion. You could almost convince yourself of the rhyme and reason of heartbreak.

Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.

Without memory there can be no insight. Without love, there can be no appreciation.

Actors and actresses make magic,' I said. 'They make things happen on the stage; they invent; they create.

Be kind. Always if you have a choice, be kind.

It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow, there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I’d envision his face.

But to think there was meaning, a scheme to things, well, that was quite beyond her philosophical reach. She feared as she always had, that all that was ever meant was loneliness, hard work, striving to make a difference when no difference could possibly be made. It was like dipping a stick into the ocean and trying to write something – all the little people of the world spinning out little patterns that lasted no more than a few years, and meant nothing at all.

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.

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.

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.

But there is no value to suffering!

I hear the birds singing. Listen. I hear them in their cage. The others-all our kind who know of her-they think of her as heartless, but she wasn't heartless. She was only aware of things which I didn't learn till so many decades had passed. She knew secrets that only suffering can teach...

The only power that exists is inside ourselves.

You’re a mystery the way a sacrament is a mystery.

Darkness had been essentially banished from the Earth. It had become a choice.

I tell you, Richard, if you ever get ready to sell your soul, don’t bother to sell it to another human being. It’s bad business to even consider such a thing.

All my life,I've been afraid of things, as a child and a woman must be. I lied about it naturally. I fancied myself a witch and walked in dark streets to punish myself for my doubts. But I knew what it meant to be afraid.And now, in this darkness, I fear nothing. If you were to leave me here, I would feel nothing. I would walk as I am walking now. As a man, you can't know what I mean by what I say.You can't know a woman's vulnerability. You can't know the sense of power that belongs to me now.

Writers had a way of redeeming everything that ever happens to them.

Evil is a point of view. We are immortal. And what we have before us are the rich feasts that conscience cannot appreciate and mortal men cannot know without regret. God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering His earth and all its kingdoms.

And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would die tomorrow or the day after or eventually... it doesn't matter. Because if God does not exist, then life... every second of it... Is all we have.

A perfectly evil Devil makes even less sense than a perfect God.

Evil is a point of view ... God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately ... for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves.God kills indiscriminately and so shall we. For no creatures under God are as we are none so like him as ourselves.

Evil is anything that goes against life, harms life, stifles life, destroys life. Evil is bringing harm to another person, inflicting unnecessary pain, suffering, or confusion. All evil comes from this. This is the root of all evil.

If goodness does exist, then I'm the opposite of it. I'm evil, and I revel in it

God kills indiscriminately and so shall we. For no creatures under God are as we are none so like him as ourselves.

Is there any one of us who doesn’t want to strike back at all the evil in this world?

Because if God doesn't exist we are the creaturesof highest consciousness in the universe. We alone understand thepassage of time and the value off every minute of human life. Andwhat constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would have died tomorrow or the day after oreventually . . . it doesn't matter. Because if God does not exist, this life . . . every second of it . . . is all we have.

I would die rather than live without you. I would die the same way he died. I can't bear you to look at me the way you did. I cannot bear it if you do not love me!" -Claudia.

The horror was this: the others.

Amazing what the British do with language; the nuances of politeness. The world's great diplomats, surely.

Who could trust language?

Finally those you love are simply ... those you love.

...But still, even now, to think of it, I feel something akin to that happiness. And I've more reason now than ever to say that happiness is not what I will ever know, or will ever deserve to know. I am not so much in love with happiness. Yet the name Paris makes me feel it.

Because people don't believe it unless it happens to them.

And do stop trying to determine if I am a man or a woman. The fact is I'm a good part both and therefore neither one. I was just explaining to your Aunt Queen. I was born endowed with the finest traits of both sexes and I drift this way and that as I choose.

What mysteries we are, human, vampire, monster, mortal, that we can love and hate simultaneously, and that emotions of all sorts might not parade for what they are not.

To be human, that's what most of us long for. It is the human which has become myth to us.

I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body focused with the mind upon one vital source.

And you are with us and one of us, and we are the people of the moon and the stars.

But I lived a lie. I lived it out of anger. This is what I am trying to tell you. I have lived lies. I have done it again and again. I live lies because I cannot endure the weakness of anger and I cannot admit the irrationality of love. Oh the lies I have told myself and others. I knew it yet I didn't know.

I hear nothing. I hear nothing, but what does it mean that I hear nothing? I walk in the cemeteries of this city at night and I hear nothing. I walk among mortals and sometimes I hear nothing. I walk alone and I hear nothing, as if I myself had no inner voice.

New Orleans, city of roaches, city of decay, city of our family, and of happy, happy people.

I had to have him, had to. Just the way I had to have everything I wanted; or had to do everything I'd ever wanted to do.

And this lesson about mortal peace of mind I never forgot. Even if a ghost is ripping a house to pieces, throwing in pans all over, pouring water of pillows, making clocks chime at all hours, mortal will accept almost any "natural explanation" offered, no matter how absurd, rather than the obvious supernatural one, for what is going on.

Because," she said, "that is what men would call it. They invented Satan, didn't they? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which men want to live.

Ah, what broken creatures we are, and how we endure.

Heaven would be Hell in no time if every cruel, selfish, vicious soul went to Heaven.

Maybe we do go home, finally.

Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.

Who has a right to tell me I have no gift, no talent, no passion ...' he murmured. 'Why do people say those things to you when youre young? Doesn't seem fair, does it?''No, darling, it's not fair,'she said. 'But the mystery is why you listen.

In the story of the prince and the frog, there’s always a frog. This story ... it has no frog.

You, know, the only thing I can be is a writer. I'm absolutely unprepared for anything else. When you've lived the kind of life I have, you are good for nothing. Only writing can save you.

You see that old woman? That will never happen to you. You will never grow old, and you will never die.And it means something else too, doesn't it? I shall never ever grow up.

I was still sitting there, too unsure of myself to say anything, when Nicolas kissed me.'Let's go to bed,' he said softly.

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.

In the spring of 1988, I returned to New Orleans, and as soon as I smelled the air, I knew I was home. It was rich, almost sweet, like the scent of jasmine and roses around our old courtyard. I walked the streets, savoring that long lost perfume.

We live in a world full of accidents finally in which on aesthetic principles have a consistency of which we can be sure. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever striving to create and maintain an ethical balance. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever, striving to create and maintain an ethical balance; but the shimmer of summer rain under the street lamps or the great flashing glare of artillery against a night sky – such brutal beauty is beyond dispute.

Lestat and Louie feel sorry for vampires that sparkle in the sun. They would never hurt immortals who choose to spend eternity going to high school over and over again in a small town ---- anymore than they would hurt the physically disabled or the mentally challenged. My vampires possess gravitas. They can afford to be merciful.

As I looked down at him, as I saw his yellow hair pressed against my coat, I had a vision of him from long ago, that tall, stately gentleman in the swirling black cape, with his head thrown back, his rich, flawless voice singing the lilting air of the opera from which we'd only just come, his walking stick tapping the cobblestones in time with the music, his large, sparkling eye catching the young woman who stood by, enrapt, so that a smile spread over his face as the song died on his lips; and for one moment, that one moment when his eye met hers, all evil seemed obliterated in that flush of pleasure, that passion for merely being alive.

You let me handle Marius," I said. "Now, you didn't come without you dagger.""No, I did not," he said, lifting his cloak to reveal it, "And with your permission I would like to plunge it through my heart now so I will most assuredly stone-cold dead before the Master of this house arrives home to find you runnning rampant in his garden!""Permission denied.

We are the things that others fear," I said. "Remember that.

I watched him rise from the coffin, with slow, elegant gestures; our gestures, for we are the only beings who routinely rise from coffins.

After all, these were blood drinkers, beings who spoke gently, liked poetry, and yet killed mortals all the time.

Alas, my being the James Bond of vampires isn't the whole issue. Vanity must wait.

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.

The sky was growing dangerously light when I left Lestat and made my way to the secret place, below an abandoned building where I kept the iron coffin in which I lie.This is no unusual configuration among our kind-the sad old building, my title to it, or the cellar room cut off from the world above by iron doors no mortal could independently seek to lift.

In his refusal to believe in anything supernatural or inherently evil, he was as unrealistic as an old voodoo queen who sees spirits everywhere.

Lestat: Toughen up baby. I'm looking for the eternal scum.

Lestat: You're very anxious to be out of these rooms, aren't you? Why don't we simply get into bed together? I don't understand.David: You're serious?Lestat: Of courseDavid: You do realize, that this is an absolutely magnificent body, don't you? I mean you aren't insensible to the fact that you've been deposited in a...a most impressive piece of young male flesh.Lestat: I looked it over well before the switch, remember? Why is it you don't want to..David: You've been with a woman, haven't you?Lestat: I wish you hadn't read my mind. It's rude. Besides, what does that matter to you?David: A woman you loved.Lestat: I have always loved both men and women.David: That's a slightly different use of the word 'love.

I touched the small sacred images. I shook my head and bit my lip, as if to say, How awful that he should have stolen these! But I also found it very funny. And further proof that God had no power over me.

Lestat: I despise you! I ought to destroy you-finish what I started when I made you. Turn you into ashes and sift them through my hands. You know that I could do it! Like that! Like the snap of mortal fingers, I could do it. Burn you as I burnt your little house. And nothing could save you, nothing at all.

And I realized that I’d tolerated him this long because of self-doubt.

Information age. I guess I'm part of it, even if I can't remember how to use my iPhone from week to week, and have to learn how to send e-mails all over again every couple of years, and can't retain any profound technological knowledge about the computers I sometimes use.

One moment the world is as it is. The next, it is something entirely different. Something it has never been before.

God is a creative force, Lestat. And so are we. He told Adam, 'Increase and multiply.' That's what the first organic cells did, Lestat, increased and multiplied. Not merely changed shape but replicated themselves. God is a creative force. He made the whole universe out of Himself through cell division. That's why the devils are so full of envy-the bad angels, I mean. They are [i]not[/i] creative creatures; they have no bodies, no cells, they're spirit. And I suspect it wasn't envy so much as a form of suspicion-that God was making a mistake in making another engine of creativity in Adam, so like Himself. I mean the angels probably felt the physical universe was bad enough, with all the replicating cells, but thinking, talking beings who could increase and multiply? They were probably outraged by the whole experiment. That was their sin.""So you're saying God isn't pure spirit.""That's right. God has a body. Always did. The secret of cell-dividing life lies within God. And all living cells have a tiny part of God's spirit in them, Lestat, that's the missing piece as to what makes life happen in the first place, what separates it from nonlife. It's exactly like your vampiric genesis. You told us that the spirit of Amel-the evil entity-infused the bodies of all the vampires...Well, men share in the spirit of God in the same way.

Then, are you master of us all? You didn't teach her that. Was she supposed to imbibe it from my quiet subservience?

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.

Consequently, if you believe God made Satan, you must realize that all Satan's power comes from God and so that Satan is simply God's child, and that we are God's children also. There are no children of Satan, really.

I never knew what life was until it ran out in a red gush over any lips, my hands!

I am the Vampire Lestat. I'm immortal more or less. The light of the sun, the sustained heat of an intense fire-these things might destroy me. But then again, they might not.

Let the flesh instruct the mind.

Should we put out the light? And then put out the light. But once put out thy light, I cannot give it vital breath again. It needs must wither.

What lurked beneath my fancy frills, behind my quiet unquestioning eyes? Who was I? Had I no remembrance of a warmer flame than that which gave its wintry glow to my faint smile at those who asked it of me? I remembered no one who had ever lived and breathed within my quietly moving form~ The Vampire Armand

I think we are wise, we English speakers, to savor accents. They teach us things about our own tongue.

Good was above all kind; it was to be gentle. It was to waste nothing. It was to paint, to read, to study, to listen.

Life is a tragedy, one way or another. What is certain is that you die.

But remember the overall lesson, that your love for others, and their love for you, that the increase of love in life itself around you, is what matters.

For what can the damned really have to say to the damned?

... from the classically executed lifelike bouquets, tempting you to reach for the petals that fell on a three-dimensional tablecloth, to a new and disturbing style in which the colors seemed to blaze with such intensity they destroyed the old lines, the old solidity, to make a vision like those states which I'm nearest my delirium and flowers grow before my eyes and crackle like the flames of lamps.

Being a vampire for him meant revenge. Revenge against life itself. Every time he took a life it was revenge. It was no wonder, then, that he appreciated nothing. The nuances of vampire existence weren't even available to him because he was focused with a maniacal vengeance upon the mortal life he'd left. Consumed with hatred, he looked back. Consumed with envy, nothing pleased him unless he could take it from others; and once having it, he grew cold and dissatisfied, not loving the thing for itself; and so he went after something else. Vengeance, blind and sterile and contemptible.

I wish I could," laughed the vampire. "How positively delightful. I should like to pass through all manner of different keyholes and feel the tickle of their peculiar shapes. No." He shook his head. "That is, how would you say today . . . bullshit?

I was feeling fear. Not a wild, mortal fear, but something cold like a hook in my side.

Louis found me in the rear parlor, the one more distant from the noises of the tourists in the Rue Royale, and with its windows open to the courtyard below. I was in fact looking out the window, looking for the cat again, though I didn't tell myself so, and observing how our bougainvillea had all but covered the high walls that enclosed us and kept us safe from the rest of the world. The wisteria was also fierce in its growth, even reaching out from the brick walls to the railing of the rear balcony and finding its way up to the roof. I could never quite take for granted the lush flowers of New Orleans. Indeed, they filled me with happiness whenever I stopped to really look at them and surrender to their fragrance, as though I still had the right to do so, as though I still were part of nature, as though I were still a mortal man.

You do not know your vampire nature. You are like an adult who, looking back on his childhood, realizes that he never appreciated it. You cannot, as a man, go back to the nursery and play with your toys, asking for the love and care to be showered on you again simply because now you know their worth. So it is with you and mortal nature. You've given it up. You no longer look "through a glass darkly." But you cannot pass back to the world of human warmth with your new eyes.

Ah, come now. I look like an angel, but I'm not. The old rules of nature encompass many creatures like me. We're beautiful like the diamond-backed snake, or the striped tiger, yet we're merciless killers

But I still did not realize how mad she was, and how accustomed to dreaming; and that she would not cry out for reality, rather would feed reality to her dreams, a demon elf feeding her spinning wheel with the reeds of the world so she might make her own weblike universe.

You are the son of the Lord God! She said. That’s why you can kill and bring back to life, that’s why you can heal a blind man as Joseph saw you do, that’s why you can pray for snow and there will be snow, that’s why you can dispute with your uncle Cleopas when he forgets you’re a boy, that’s why you make sparrows from clay and bring them to life. Keep your power inside you. Guard it until your Father in Heaven shows you the time to use it. If he’s made you a child, then he’s made you a child to grow in wisdom as well as in everything 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?

Despair is so familiar to me; it could be banished by the sight of a beautiful mannekin in the window. It could be dispelled by the lights surrounding a tower. It would be lifted by the great ghostly shape of St. Patrick's coming into view. And then despair would come again. Meaningless, I almost said, aloud.

It seemed at momemts, When I sat alone in the dark stateroom, that the sky had come down to meet the sea and some great secert was to be revealed.

It seemed at moments, when I sat alone in the dark stateroom, that the sky had come down the meet the sea and some great secret was to be revealed.

I was at a loss suddenly; but conscious all the while of how Armand listened; that he listened in the way that we dream of others listening, his face seeming to reflect on every thing said. He did not start forward to seize on my slightest pause, to assert an understanding of something before the thought was finished, or to argue with a swift, irresistible impulse -- the things which often make dialogue impossible.And after a long interval he said, 'I want you. I want you more than anything in the world.

On writing, my advice is the same to all. If you want to be a writer, write. Write and write and write. If you stop, start again. Save everything that you write. If you feel blocked, write through it until you feel your creative juices flowing again. Write. Writing is what makes a writer, nothing more and nothing less. — Ignore critics. Critics are a dime a dozen. Anybody can be a critic. Writers are priceless. — Go where the pleasure is in your writing. Go where the pain is. Write the book you would like to read. Write the book you have been trying to find but have not found. But write. And remember, there are no rules for our profession. Ignore rules. Ignore what I say here if it doesn’t help you. Do it your own way. — Every writer knows fear and discouragement. Just write. — The world is crying for new writing. It is crying for fresh and original voices and new characters and new stories. If you won’t write the classics of tomorrow, well, we will not have any. Good luck.

The most important trait of a writer is an authentic voice. Writers have to have faith in their own voice, and their own way of doing things. Originality is the gem that every writer possesses. Originality also brings on the most merciless attacks. The world resents originality in the beginning writer, and then rewards it abundantly once that writer has been successfully published. Cherish your own voice. Don't try to sound like anybody else. Sound like yourself and take the slings and arrows and keep going.

My Lasher is powerful beyond yourdreams of a daimon, and he has learnt much.’‘Learned,’ I repeated in amazement. ‘How learned, Deborah, for he is merely a spirit, and they areforever foolish and therein lies the danger, that in granting our wishes they do not understand thecomplexity of them, and thereby prove our undoing. There are a thousand tales that prove it. Has this nothappened? How so do you say learned?

Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort.

It was as if this night were only one of thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into night to make a great arching line of which I couldn’t see the end, a night in which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars.

Let tears gather in your eyes. You haven’t tears enough for what you’ve done to me. Six more mortal years, seven, eight…I might have had that shape!’ Her pointed finger flew at Madeleine, whose hands had risen to her face, whose eyes were clouded over. Her moan was almost Claudia’s name. But Claudia did not hear her. ‘Yes, that shape, I might have known what it was to walk at your side.

I never changed after that. I sought for nothing in the one great source of change which is humanity. And even in my love and absorption with the beauty of the world, I sought to learn nothing that could be given back to humanity. I drank of the beauty of the world as a vampire drinks. I was satisfied. I was filled to the brim. But I was dead. And I was changeless.

I wanted to kiss her, she was beautiful again to me. But I dared not risk it. It wasn't only that I would have frightened her, it was that the desire to kill her was almost overpowering. Some fierce purely male instinct in me wanted to claim her now simply because I had claimed her in another way before.

I was a newborn vampire, weeping at the beauty of the night.

Your body's dying...pay no attention

I'm speaking of the character of human beings, not what they believe in. I'm speaking of those who won't accept a useless life just because they were born to it. I mean those who would be something better. They work, they sacrifice, they do things..." He was moved by this, and I was a little surprised that I'd said it. Yet I felt I'd had hurt him somehow. "There is blessedness in that." I said. "There's sanctity. And God or no God, there is goodness in it. I know this the way I know the mountains are out there, that the stars shine.

You're the hunter, the warrior. You're stronger than anyone else here, that's your tragedy.

It struck me, sharp and hard, that I had been given so many chances to save my soul that my entire life had been constructed around these chances! That was my nature - going from temptation to temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed.

as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.

Love me. You have destroyed everything! But if you love me, it can all be restored in a new form. Love me.

The greatest create of power you have on earth, whether you are an angel, a spirit, a man or woman or child is to help others.

I’d like to meet the devil some night,’ he said once with a malignant smile. ‘I’d chase him from here to the wilds of the Pacific. I am the devil.

When he speaks into your ear so thatno one can hear, he will say he is your slave, that he’s passed to you from Deirdre. But it’s a lie, my dear,a vicious lie. He’ll make you his and drive you mad if you refuse to do his will. That is what he’s done tothem all.’ She stopped, her wrinkled brows tightening, her eyes drifting off across the dusty surface of thetable. ‘Except for those who were strong enough to rein him in and make him the slave he claimed to be,and use him for their own ends… ’ Her voice trailed off. ‘Their own endless wickedness.

He’ll take from your mind the answer best suited to lead you on, to enthrall you. He’ll weave a web of deceits so thick you won’t see the world through it. He wants your strength and he’ll say what he must say to get it. Break the chain, child! You’re the strongest of them all! Break the chain and he’ll go backto hell for he has no other place to go in all the wide world to find strength like yours. Don’t you see?He’s created it. Bred sister to brother, and uncle to niece, and son to mother, yes, that too, when he hadto do it, to make an ever more powerful witch, only faltering now and then, and gaining what he lost in one generation by even greater strength in the next. What was the cost of Antha and Deirdre if he could have a Rowan!

You think he has no will of his own? You are a fool,Charlotte. Lie with him instead of me!’ I laughed at her, and seeing the pain in her eyes, I laughed more.‘I should like to see it, you and your daimon. Lie there and call him to come now.

Well, I am no village cunning woman, no frightened merry-begot, but a woman born to riches, andeducated from the time I can remember, and given all that I could possibly desire. And now in mytwenty-second year, already a mother and soon perhaps to be a widow, I rule in this place. I ruledbefore my mother gave to me all her secrets, and her great familiar, Lasher, and I mean to study thisthing, and make use of it, and allow it to enhance my considerable strength.

There are many worlds in the 'Realm of Worlds' where the ascendant beings are not male or female.

She had understood before she had ever dreamed of a city such as this, where every texture, every color, leapt out at you, where every fragrance was a drug, and the air itself was something alive and breathing.

Lasher,’ she said, ‘for the wind which you send that lashes the grasslands, for the wind that lashes the leaves from the trees.

I kept glancing at him and away from him, as if his green eyes were hurting me. In modern parlance he was a laser beam. Deadly and delicate he seemed. His victims had always loved him. And I had always loved him, hadn't I, no matter what happened, and how strong could love grow if you had eternity to nourish it, and it took only these few moments in time to renew its momentum, its heat?-Lestat

Why does shame and self-loathing become cruelty to the innocent ?

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.

Killing is no ordinary act,' said the vampire. 'One doesn't simply glut oneself on blood.' He shook his head. 'It is the experience of another's life for certain, and often the experience of the loss of that life through the blood, slowly. It is again and again the experience when I sucked the blood from Lestat's wrist and felt his heart pound with my heart. It is again and again a celebration of that experience; because for vampires that is the ultimate experience.

I will be the Vampire Lestat for all to see. A symbol, a freak of nature - something loved, something despised all of those things. I tell you I can't give it up. I can't miss. And quite frankly I am not in the least afraid."- Lestat, The Vampire Lestat, p. 532

We were at that moment of drunkenness that the two of us had come to call the Golden Moment, when everything made sense. We always tried to stretch out that moment, and then inevitably one of us would confess, "I can't follow anymore, I think the Golden Moment's passed.

Come on, say it again. I'm a perfect devil. Tell me how bad I am. It makes me feel so good!

A large American automobile came crawling close to us, and we could hear from behind its thick windows the deep bass of the radio, and the nasty words of a hateful song.It seemed like so much of modern music, a din to drive human beings mad.

What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it’s that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness ofnormality that is just a myth.

Maybe I'll obey the rules. Some of them, anyway, who knows? What are you going to do if I don't, by the way, and haven't I asked you this before?

I realized aloud in the midst of saying it that even when we die we probably don't find out the answer as to why we were ever alive. Even the avowed atheist probably thinks that in death he'll get some answer. I mean God will be there, or there won't be anything at all.'But that's just it,' I said, 'we don't make any discovery at that moment! We merely stop! We pass into nonexistence without ever knowing a thing.' I saw the universe, a vision of the sun, the planets, the stars, black night going on forever. And I began to laugh.'Do you realize that! We'll never know why the hell any of it happened, not even when it's over!' I shouted at Nicolas, who was sitting back on the bed, nodding and drinking his wine out of a flagon. 'We're going to die and not even know. We'll never know, and all this meaninglessness will just go on and on and on. And we won't any longer be witness to it. We won't have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We'll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing!

As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that.

All the mortal world is a lethal enemy during those hours between dawn and dusk.

I don't think you can hold in your mind the full conception of what the world is.

Malady of mortality

We're frightened of what makes us different.

The truth is laughter always sounds more perfect than weeping. Laughter flows in a violent riff and is effortlessly melodic. Weeping is often fought choked half strangled or surrendered to with humiliation.

It was as if I had only just been able to see colours and shapes for the first time. I was so enthralled with the buttons on Lestat's black coat that I looked at nothing else for a long time.

Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets--as vast and indestructible as nature itself. All was embraced by her, by her volatile and enchanted populace thronging the galleries, the theaters, the cafes, giving birth over and over to genius and sanctity, philosophy and war, frivolity and the finest art; so it seemed that if all the world outside her were to sink into darkness, what was fine, what was beautiful, what was essential might there still come to its finest flower. Even the majestic trees that graced and sheltered her streets were attuned to her--and the waters of the Seine, contained and beautiful as they wound through her heart; so that the earth on that spot, so shaped by blood and consciousness, had ceased to be the earth and had become Paris.