Anne Rice Quotes

Your love to others, and their love for you, that the increase of love in life itself around you, is what matters.

I no nothing of god or the devil, and after 400 years ... This is the only real evil left ...

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.

If I am an angel, paint me with black wings.

Vampires always order hot drinks. They aren't going to drink them; but they can feel the warmth and smell them if they're hot, and that is so good.

It was from Dionysus, the wine god, that the theater came.

So until we meet again, I am thinking of you always; I love you; I wish you were here ... in my arms.

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

Call me Ramses the Damned. For that is the name I have given myself. But I was once Ramses the Great of Upper and Lower Egypt, slayer of the Hittites, father of many sons and daughters, who ruled Egypt for sixty-four years.

It was only that I'd suffered like that, hour after hour, that I'd gone into the circle of hell and come back out. They hadn't been in the circle of hell. And I felt quiet all over. In this common occurrence, I understood the meaning of utter loneliness.

No matter how long we exist, we have our memories. Points in time which time itself cannot erase. Suffering may distort my backward glances, but even to suffering, some memories will yield nothing of their beauty or their splendor. Rather they remain as hard as gems.

Tonio Treschi was that half man, that less than man that arouses the contempt of every whole man who looks upon it. Tonio Treschi was that thing which women cannot leave alone and men find infinitely disturbing, frightening, pathetic, the butt of jokes and endless bullying, the necessary evil of the church choirs and the opera stage which is, outside that artifice and grace and soaring music, very simply monstrous.

She was innately suspicious of language because she could "hear" with remarkable accuracy what lay behind it, and also she just didn't know how to talk very well.

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.

I will write things, he was thinking. I will write something meaningful and wonderful someday. I can do that. And I'll dedicate it to you because you're the first person who ever made me think I could.

There's no way to cheat a sensualist like me, somebody who can die laughing for hours over the pattern of the carpet in a hotel lobby.

The fact that I loved you was the greatest lie I have ever lived.

She appeared in a dashing fur coat and very high heels, with a bottle of bootleg whiskey in a brown paper bag from which she drank all during the meeting, erupting into wild laughter

But you're dead inside to me, you're cold and beyond my reach! It is as if I'm not here, beside you. And, not being here with you, I have the dreadful feeling that I don't exist at all. And you are as cold and distant from me as those strange modern paintings of lines and hard forms that I cannot love or comprehend, as alien as those hard mechanical sculptures of this age which have no human form. I shudder when I'm near you. I look into your eyes and my reflection isn't there ...

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.

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.

Lord God, to be born with no talent is bad enough, but to have a macabre and febrile imagination as well is a curse.

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

Was it fair to say I didn't know the full state of my soul?

The idea was simply that there was somebody who knew everything, somebody who had seen everything. I did not mean by this that a Supreme Being existed, but rather that there was on earth a continual intelligence, a continual awareness. And I thought of it in practical terms that excited me and soothed me simultaneously.

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?

Oh, but when love is reached through suffering, it has a power it can never gain through innocence.

He had not perished. That might be his only significant accomplishment. He had survived. Yes, he'd been defeated, more than once. But fortune had refused to release him. And he was here now, whole, and quietly accepting of the fact though he honestly did not know why.

And she and I, we will take that guilt to our graves of whatever we did and didn't do, or had to do, or failed to do

Wasn't it his right to listen to opera, read poetry and adventure novels, go to Europe every couple of months for some reason or another, and drive his Porsche over the speed limit until he found out who he was?

I saw these men and knew what they wanted, that this was vice, and despicable, and the price of it was Hell.

My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn't understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become.

In time," he said with a sigh, "I found a woman in a lowly hut, a cunning woman, a healer, such a thing as men call a witch and a hag. Hesketh was her name. She was a prisoner of hideousness as was I.

There was no point in waiting until the next world. You had to do everything now, every kind of sin.

And a sad realization drifted through my head, something to do with how young she was, how good she looked in any light, how light didn't make the slightest difference with her. And how old I was, and how all young people, even plain young people, had begun to look beautiful to me.

The old gods will bring about vengeance not so much because they exist but because I once honored them.

I enjoy the Web site a lot and I like being able to talk to my readers. I've always had a very close relationship with them.

How could I not love it, the mere idea of it? How could it not be worth the greatest danger, the greatest and most ghastly defeat? Even at the moment of destruction, I would be alive as I have never been.

I've always been my own teacher. And I must confess I've been my favorite pupil a well.

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.

Lestat,' she said, 'it is the larger scheme which means nothing.' … 'It is the small act which means all. Of course sickness and suffering will continue after I'm gone. But what's important is that I have done all I can.

What makes you think anyone has a destiny? We do what we do and we die.

Dickens is a very underrated writer at the moment. Everyone in his time admired him but I think right now he's not spoken of enough.

It was not to relive the old pain that she had returned, it was to know again, for a little while, the joy that had gone before.

Must somehow move to my restoration. I could not sink back in agony for that would breed but more agony. I must go on.

Something happens to your senses when you look on Louis. Behold Louis...

My body is no schoolboy.

In your love for one another, I heard the echo of Heaven.

The greatest creative power you have on earth ... is to help others. To ease pain and give joy are your finest powers. Kindness is a human miracle.

I didn't look to the shore much after this first long and memorable glimpse. I looked up at Heaven and her court of mythical creatures fixed forever in the all powerful and inscrutable stars. Ink black was the night beyond them, and they so like jewels that old poetry came back to me, the sound even of hymns sung only by men.

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.

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

Apparently each century yields a new kind of vampire, or let us say that our course of growth was not set in the beginning any more than the course of human beings.

I saw a spirit world so intricate and vast, so thoroughly laced through our existence here on earth, that the rivers of departing souls have no choice but to turn back to it. They were not lost, these spirits. They did not wander. They did not wail. They did not cry out for guidance or the resolution of some petty mystery that had plagued them in mortal life. They returned. They returned with hunger. They returned with joy. They sought no greater realm. And what could that mean but there is no greater realm than this, Ramses. And so why would I wish to ever leave?

Gregory had been surprised when Seth came forward and took Gregory in his arms. "I am your brother," he whispered, but this he said in the ancient tongue, the ancient tongue no longer spoken anywhere under the moon or the sun. "Forgive me that I've been cold to you. I feared you." "And I feared you," Gregory confessed, the old language coming back to him in a flood of sorrow. "My brother." Queens Blood and Blood Kindred. No, something greater, infinitely greater. And brother does not betray brother.

We have the future now," she whispered. "Does it matter that we've wasted so many opportunities to meet in the past?

'She's an era for you, an era of your life. If and when you break with her, you break with the only one alive who has shared that time with you. You fear that, the isolation of it, the burden, the scope of eternal life.

When we love and want nothing but good for that person, it's one of the greatest gifts we possess.

If only we would wake from (these) states of oblivion with some certain sense that there was no mystery to life at all, that cruelty was purely impersonal, but we don't.

I'd known for a long time why I loved history. It was because the historians made it sound so coherent, so purposeful, so complete. They'd take an entire century and impose a meaning on it, a personality, a destiny - and this was, of course, a lie.

In perfect understanding, it seemed, they looked at each other. Questions of failure, of haste, all the what if's of life, did not matter. The quiet in her was talking to the quiet in him.

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 of
normality that is just a myth.

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.

The world devours the world to make the world

Yes. To write a novel is to risk my sanity. The deeper I get into the suffering and conflict of the characters, into the very situations and thoughts and feelings that make the novel worthwhile, the worse I feel, and the more likely I am to be severely depressed when the book is finished. There is no avoiding this: it is the result of attempting to tell all you know, to reach for the stars, to write what matters.

The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass.

Hell's Bells ringing, my secret music...

He was tired and full of shame, and if Ernestino and the others wouldn't brave this rain, he would go it alone, he would find some place to sing, some place where, anonymous and numbed by drink, he could sing until he had forgotten everything.

And then there came the pounding of another drum, as if another giant were coming yards behind him, and each giant, intent on his own drum, gave no notice to the rhythm of the other. The sound grew louder and louder until it seemed to fill not just my hearing but all my senses, to be throbbing in my lips and fingers, in the flesh of my temples, in my veins.

And you have never given me your love.

Put out the light and then put out the light.

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

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

Dear God, help me. Do not forget me on this tiny cinder lost in a galaxy that is lost–a heart no bigger than a speck of dust beating, beating against death, against meaninglessness, against guilt, against sorrow.

Now, when a vampire goes underground as we call it - when he ceases to drink blood and he just lies in the earth - he soon becomes too weak to resurrect himself, and what follows is a dream state.

Do we have to confess our loves to everyone?" asked Thorne softly. "Can we not keep some secrets?

Here's my love, not in little droplets, but from the very river of my being. It reaches all the way down to the roots of my being, tangling my heart in its burning mesh. For you. Drink deep.

The awareness of happiness comes after, in memory, with the belated appreciation of the moment.

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

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

Goodnight sweet prince, may flights of devils wing you to your rest.

The world doesn't need any more mediocrity or hedged bets.

But no one will weep for me or for them. They have been buried, nameless, beneath five centuries of time.
I am a vampire.
My name is Vittorio, and I write this now in the tallest tower of the ruined mountaintop castle in which I was born, in the northernmost part of Tuscany, that most beautiful of lands in the very center of Italy.

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

But know this. All is speculation under the sky. All myth, all religion, all philosophy, all history - is lies.

He imagined his past gone, along with his future. Death was the understanding of the immediate present: that there is finally nothing else.

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

I saw a bird soaring out of a cave above the open sea. And there was something terrifying about the bird and the endless waves over which it flew. Higher and higher it went and the sky turned to silver and then gradually the silver faded and the sky went dark. The darkness of evening nothing to fear, really, nothing. Blessed darkness. But it was falling gradually and inexorably over nothing save this one tiny creature cawing in the wind above a great wasteland that was the world. Empty caves, empty sands, empty sea.

Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past.

I find at moments I'm as fragile as glass.

Deidre called it twilight. Rita had seen the word written out, all right, but she'd never heard anyone really say it. Twilight.

You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.

The explanation of evil is a hell of a lot more disappointing than that. It's blunders, people making blunders, whether it's raiding a village and killing all the inhabitants, or killing a child in a fit of rage. Mistakes. Everything is simply a matter of mistakes.

Who were the men who did this?" Guido demanded suddenly.
Tonio was putting on his cloak. He looked up as if already in deep thought.
"Fools," he answered, "at the command of a coward.

Our way–the Western Way–has always been a "work in progress." Questions of life and death, good and evil, justice and tragedy–these are never definitively settled, but must be addressed again and again as personal and public worlds shift and change. We hold our morals to be absolutes, but the context of our actions and decisions is forever changing. We are not relativists because we seek to re-evaluate again and again our most crucial moral positions.

Every moment must be first known and then savored.

We need to stop fighting Christian against Christian. I have no time for anything but trying to love other people. That is a full-time job.

You think anything is possible. But that isn't so. The world closes tight around this miracle soon enough; and you don't hope for other miracles.

Aren't there gradations of evil? Is evil a great perilous gulf into which one falls with the first sin, plummeting to the depth?

Whipping is fifty percent show and noise.