Anne Rice Quotes

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. ~ Anne Rice

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. ~ Anne Rice

The Cardinal was bent over his writing desk, the room unchanged save for the light of what appeared a small antique oil lamp. And there were illuminated letters in the book before him, tiny figures fitted into the capitals, the whole gleaming as he let his hand, quivering, turn the page.
"Ah, think of it," he said, smiling as he saw Tonio, "written language the possession of those who took such pains to preserve it. I am forever entranced with the forms in which knowledge is given us, not by nature, but by our fellow man. ~ Anne Rice

You reflect your age differently. You reflect its broken heart. ~ Anne Rice

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. ~ Anne Rice

Rhosh, remember the being's skin, smooth, dark brown skin, like this one's skin, and the being's hair. The hair was the same, thick like this and with loose curls and the very same golden streak in it, only broader and on the right side of the head. ~ Anne Rice

But don't you see, all human decisions are made like this. Do you think the mother knows what will happen to the child in her womb? Dear God, we are lost, I tell you. What does it matter if you give it to me and it's wrong! There is no wrong! There is only desperation, and I would have it! I want to live forever with you. ~ Anne Rice

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. ~ Anne Rice

But let me be a lover in the Savage Garden with you, and the light that went out of life would come back in a great burst of glory. Out of mortal flesh I would pass into eternity. I would be one of you. - Daniel ~ Anne Rice

St. Augustine wrote something once, something I think about often," he said. " 'God triumphs on the ruins of our plans.' And maybe that is what is happening here. We make blunders, we make mistakes, and somehow new doors open, new possibilities arise, opportunities of which we've never dreamed. ~ Anne Rice

He had learned something from a book which others believed must be learned from doing or practice. ~ Anne Rice

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. ~ Anne Rice

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? ~ Anne Rice

Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a very dangerous enemy indeed. ~ Anne Rice

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. ~ Anne Rice

If the mind can find no meaning, then the senses give it. Live for this, wretched being that you are. ~ Anne Rice

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. ~ Anne Rice

That's the glory of it; thousands of years have passed and yet you can follow Him so close! ~ Anne Rice

And so this young one, this young one whom I had so loved, I had to forsake, no matter how broken my heart, no matter how lonely my soul, no matter how bruised my intellect and spirit. ~ Anne Rice

He bent close to me, and suddenly kissed me, in a manner that seemed entirely childlike and also a bit European. ~ Anne Rice

I resolved to move just a little bit more slowly through the world, to look around myself with greater care, and to try to remain conscious of all that was going on around me at all times. ~ Anne Rice

Genealogy belongs to the rich in human history. The poor rise and fall without leaving a footprint. ~ Anne Rice

We're frightened of what makes us different. ~ Anne Rice

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

Perhaps this is the only real evil left. ~ Anne Rice

I think to feel this happy is to be miserable, to feel this much satisfaction is to burn. ~ Anne Rice

I tucked my arm under my head and started crying like a child. I was perishing from exhaustion. I was worn and miserable and I loved crying. I couldn't do anything else. I gave in to it fully. I felt that profound release of the utterly grief-stricken. I didn't give a damn who saw or heard. I cried and cried. ~ Anne Rice

She was coming. She was moving close to the hall. He felt himself slip away from his body into pure listening; yes, it was she. All the sounds of the night rose to confuse him, yet he caught it; a low irreducible sound which she could not veil, the sound of her breathing, of the beat of her heart, of a force moving through space at tremendous and unnatural speed, causing the inevitable tumult amid the visible and the invisible. ~ Anne Rice

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

Remember, Rose, whatever you've suffered, no matter how bad it's been, you can use that, use that to be a stronger person. ~ Anne Rice

Go ahead, throw this book away. Spit on me. Revile me. I dare you. Cast me out of your intellectual orbit. Throw me out of your backpack. Pitch me in the airport trash bin. Leave me on a bench in Central Park!
What do I care?
No. I don't want you to do all that. Don't do that.
DON'T DO IT! ~ Anne Rice

Although we cannot number the infinite, nevertheless it can be comprehended by Him whose knowledge has no bounds. ~ Anne Rice

There are ways to live this life, and my way has always been one of inclusion - of our own kind, of all humankind, of all spirits, of all things under the sun. It's not a virtue with me. I don't know any other way to move through the world. ~ Anne Rice

In all my life," Ernestino said, "I have never heard a voice like that. God has touched you, Signore. But sing while you can, because it won't be long before those high notes leave you forever. ~ Anne Rice

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. ~ Anne Rice

Goodbye, darling, would I could leave you with something, some little thing...'
'You leave me with all I'll ever need,' she said softly. There was resignation in her voice. 'You leave me with some hours that other women must make up or read about in stories. ~ Anne Rice

I would have done just about anything for him. ~ Anne Rice

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. ~ Anne Rice

One doesn't simply glut oneself on blood. ~ Anne Rice

Please, Master, I can't endure this," I said. "Then, how will you endure eternity, my child? Don't you know that's what I mean to give you? What power under God is there that can break me? ~ Anne Rice

Evil is a point of view. ~ Anne Rice

Don't you see? It is a new age. It requires a new evil. And I am that new evil. ~ Anne Rice

And time would open up to us and we would be the teachers of one another. All the things that gave you happiness would give me happiness; and I would be the protector of your pain. My power would be your power. My strength the same. But you're dead inside to me, you're cold and beyond reach! ~ Anne Rice

Maybe this is madness. Maybe that's what Hell is. You go mad. And all your demons come and get you just as fast as you can think them up. ~ Anne Rice

In these last few days, we were close because we were both mortal men. We saw the same sun and the same twilight, we felt the same pull of the earth beneath our feet. We drank together and broke bread together. We might have made love together, if you had only allowed such a thing. But that's all changed. You have your youth, yes, and all the dizzying wonder that accompanies the miracle. But I still see death when I look at you. I know now I cannot be your companion, and you cannot be mine ~ Anne Rice

There had never been any talent, any talent to draw or paint or to make music or to write or to make any of the wonderful and beautiful things he'd loved. There was only the keen eye to appreciate it, the heartbreaking capacity to perceive talent in others all around ... only a gentleman's means could have kept him close to the talent of others, kept him close to all that was fine and enduring and filled life with daily grace. ~ Anne Rice

Some mysteries are simply irresistible," she said. "They have components that alter a life. ~ Anne Rice

'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. ~ Anne Rice

Give me the heartbeat. Give me the salt. Give me the Viaticum. Fill my mouth. ~ Anne Rice

I've loved you more than any being in all the world whom I've ever loved. ~ Anne Rice

When you find out there is no ultimate good and evil in which you can place your faith, the world does not fall apart at the seams. It simply means that every decision is more difficult, more critical, because you are creating the good and evil yourself and they are very real. ~ Anne Rice

My life's been too much of a self-created vocation. And there are times when I think I've done everything in the name of defiance. ~ Anne Rice

The fans, the vampire groupies, love the idea of this androgynous, preternatural figure stalking the night, and craving aesthetic pleasure just as he craves blood, wearing only the best velvet clothes, and savoring red roses. ~ Anne Rice

She said further that this Geneva blood drinker was tragically in love with Lestat. ~ Anne Rice

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. ~ Anne Rice

I love you still, that's the torment of it. Lestat I never loved. But you! The measure of my hatred is that love. They are the same! Do you know now how much I hate you! ~ Anne Rice

Time can tick when there is no clock. ~ Anne Rice

I have read every book in the 'Dune' series and every Anne Rice book. ~ Lorraine Toussaint

He said at dinner last night, "Not a day goes by, when I don't ask a cosmic question. Does life have meaning? Or is this all smoke and mirrors? Are we all doomed? ~ Anne Rice

God, why didn't you make us all dogs? ~ Anne Rice

Once I returned to the Church and began to see the universe as a place that really did incorporate redemption and really tried to understand the implications of there being a God, my identification with the vampires as outcasts, as outsiders and lost souls began to totally wane. It no longer worked for me. I had done it. It had led me to this point. ~ Anne Rice

Sometimes dreams show me that my writing should go deeper. Dreams have not so much changed my work as deepened it. ~ Anne Rice

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. ~ Anne Rice

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 ... ~ Anne Rice

Nothing vanishes quite like pain - when pain does vanish, that is. Because most of the time pain never does. ~ Anne Rice

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

I've loved Anne Rice's books all my life and being able to talk with her was surreal. It was the only time I've ever been truly starstruck. ~ Alistair Cross

I felt ravaged, and with both hands in a fantasy I reached out for her figure as we ran together through the meadow which belonged only to us and to which these others could never be admitted.
"Oh, inocent love," she said even as she drank from me, "oh, innocent innocent love. ~ Anne Rice

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. ~ Anne Rice

I'd drink your blood if I could and hook you into every memory inside me, every heartbreak, frame of reference, temporary triumph, petty defeat, mystic moment of surrender. ~ Anne Rice

Everyone today has a story; the world's an archive. ~ Anne Rice

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

With his finger curled under his lip, his elbow on the arm of the couch, he merely studied me as I recounted the memories, and now he was eager for the tale to go on. ~ Anne Rice

I'm ashamed, ashamed that I want you and that it sustains me to think, just to think, that because of all you've lost, you might love me. ~ Anne Rice

It's all about aesthetics, morality and aesthetics are completely similar. ~ Anne Rice

The NRA disgraced itself this morning with a self-serving press event in which they demonized the media and the entertainment industry for gun violence in America, and advocated a national data base for all mentally ill persons. They apparently want armed guards in all American schools, and it seems, armed volunteers as well. Shocking. ~ Anne Rice

But death we are, and death we've always been. ~ Anne Rice

It will be under the name David Talbot." "My clothes. There's a stash of them here under the name Isaac Rummel. Just a suitcase or two, and some coats. It's really winter, isn't it?" I gave him the key to the room. This was humiliating. Rather like making a servant of him. Perhaps he'd change his mind and put our new lodgings under the name of Renfield. ~ Anne Rice

For always in her there was a dark place full of despair and a great dividing force to make meaning because there was none. ~ Anne Rice

I had a great and unshakable love of her. I don't think anyone else did. And one thing that endeared her to me always was that she never said anything ordinary. ~ Anne Rice

Your evil is that you cannot be evil. And I shall suffer for it no longer! ~ Anne Rice

If there is any sea as blue as the Caribbean I have never beheld it, and when it is seen at twilight, it is most spectacular, but then you will hear more of this later, for I have had much time to contemplate the color of this sea. On ~ Anne Rice

I think any supernatural hero today, whether he's a vampire, werewolf, a resuscitated mummy, whatever he is, is going to have to deal with the fact that scientists are going to want to catch him and study him. His big enemy is not going to be Dr. Van Helsing today, it's going to be the doctor who wants to put him in a lab and get his blood for what it can do to cure disease or grant immortality. ~ Anne Rice

But vampires feel cold as acutely as humans, and the blood of the kill is often the rich, sensual alleviation of that cold. But ~ Anne Rice

He can see us, said the angel who had been gesturing so pointedly. His voice was subdued but seemed to reach my ears effortlessly and gently. ~ Anne Rice

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. ~ Anne Rice

There may be writing groups where people meet but it's occasional. You really do it all at your own computer or your own typewriter by yourself. ~ Anne Rice

His eyes closed for a split second and he sank against Armand's shoulder, feeling Armand's hand on his back. Far away he heard Armand's voice: What do I do with you, my beloved? Especially now, when I myself am so afraid. ~ Anne Rice

You will not feel anything. When you detonate the explosion, you will cease to be. That's all. There is no life beyond biological life. There is no life beyond visible life. ~ Anne Rice

You know nothing ... And suppose the vampire who made you knew nothing, and the vampire who made that vampire knew nothing, and the vampire before him knew nothing, and so it goes back and back, nothing proceeding from nothing, until there is nothing! And we must live with the knowledge that there is no knowledge. ~ Anne Rice

At last he stood staring at the old Reuben Golding he thought he knew so well, and neither had a word for the other that mattered. ~ Anne Rice

Perhaps the prince will never come and maybe sleeping beautys dead ~ Anne Rice

When it's happening it is too beautiful, too overwhelming, and you can feel it's being lost with every breath you take. ~ Anne Rice

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

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

Maybe we do go home, finally. ~ Anne Rice

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. ~ Anne Rice

Poetry is truth ... It is the highest truth, and eloquence is its attribute. ~ Anne Rice

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. ~ Anne Rice

The horror was, Cleopatra meant something to these modern people of the twentieth century which was altogether wrong. She had become a symbol of licentiousness, when in fact she had possessed a multitude of amazing talents. They had punished her for her one flaw by forgetting everything else…Remembered, but not for what she was. A painted whore lying on a silken couch. - Ramses ~ Anne Rice