Memnoch the Devil (The Vampire Chronicles, #5)

by Anne Rice

I woke up one morning and I believed in nothing.”

The Dying God who gives birth to Man was a young idea in the minds of those too primitive to conceive of anything absolute and perfect. So He grafted himself—God Incarnate—upon human myths that try to explain things as if they had meaning, when perhaps they don’t.”

“Where was His sacrifice in making the world?”

He says that suffering of sentient beings is like decay; it fertilizes the growth of their souls! He looks from His lofty height upon a massacre and He sees magnificence. He sees men and women never loving so much as when they lose their loved ones, never loving so much as when they sacrifice for others for some abstract notion of Him, never loving so much as when the conquering army comes down to lay waste the hearth, divide the flock, and catch up the bodies of infants on their spears. “His justification? It’s in Nature. It’s what He created. And if battered and embittered souls must fall into my hands first and suffer my tutelage in Hell, so much the greater will they become!”

Hell would have to be where they see the consequences of their actions, but with a full merciful comprehension of how little they themselves knew.”

In the name of the cross, more injustice has been perpetrated than for any other single cause or emblem or philosophy or creed on Earth.

“Hell is where I straighten things out that He has made wrong,” he said. “Hell is where I reintroduce a frame of mind that might have existed had suffering never destroyed it! Hell is where I teach men and women that they can be better than He is.