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

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

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Maybe we do go home, finally.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

All right. Here's the deal, bigshot: suck my cock. Do that and I'll let you go. Straight trade."He unzipped his fly and pulled down the elastic front of his shorts. Something that looked like a dead whitesnake fell out. Johnny observed the thin stream of blood driz-zling from it without surprise. The cop was bleeding from every other orifice, wasn't he?"Speaking in the literature sense," the cop said, grinning, "this particular blowjob is going to be a little more Anne Rice than Armistead Maupin. I suggest you follow Queen Victoria's advice - close your eyes and think of strawberry shortcake.

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.

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!