The Vampire Chronicles Collection: Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned

by Anne Rice

Then the horror would return, the realization that I was a motionless, purposeless thing condemned to sit forever in a golden shrine! Can you imagine the horror of waking suddenly to that realization? That all you have seen and heard and been is nothing but illusion, the observation of another’s life? I would return to myself. I would become again what you see before you. This idol with a heart and brain.”

“You said you would suffer martyrdom; torments unspeakable; it did not matter; if only you were to be someone who was good.”

“And later, when your innocence was gone, and you took the high road to Paris, it was the same thing you wanted; when you danced and sang for the boulevard crowds, you wanted to be good.”

“And so you would make that one?” Mael had asked with simple directness. “When it’s time,” Marius had said dismissively, “when it’s time.” Less than a year later, he had made his little blunder. “Come into’ my arms, young one, I can live without you no more.”

“I disagree with you. Will you patronize me? Tell me now how many thousands of years you’ve lived before I was born? How much you know that I don’t know?”

“When a spirit in these times haunts a house and makes predictions through the vocal cords of a five-year-old child, no one much believes it except those who see and hear it. It does not become the foundation of a great religion.

“It is as if the human species has grown immune to such things; it has evolved perhaps to a higher stage where the antics of spirits no longer befuddle it. And though religions linger—old religions which became entrenched in darker times—they are losing their influence among the educated very rapidly.

“Ghosts, of course, are spirits too. But they are without question spirits of those who have been human on earth; whereas the spirits I have been speaking of are not.

For always in her there was a dark place full of despair. And a great driving force to make meaning because there was none. “Understand, it was not a shallowness we perceived in this woman. It was a youthful belief that she could make the light shine if she tried; that she could shape the world to comfort herself; and it was also a lack of interest in the pain of others.

these spirits had no code; they were morally inferior to us.

a mixture of good and evil that seemed more dangerous than evil itself.

She had asked her questions of the supernatural—a very unwise thing to do—and the supernatural had given her answers which she could not accept; yet she could not refute them either.

“Maybe there would be no war and no rape and no violence,” I said, “if all beings were little and had little dreams, as you put it.”

‘This being has a great invisible part,’ Mekare said. ‘Were you to have seen it in its entirety, before this catastrophe took place, you would have seen something almost without end.’ “ ‘Yes,’ the Queen confessed. ‘It was as if the net covered the whole sky.’

‘It is only by concentrating such immense size that these spirits achieve any physical strength. Left on their own, they are as clouds over the horizon; greater even;

For what stays the power of mighty men save that of others of the same strength?

“Yet what has been the price of that faith which galvanizes countries and sends army against army; which divides up the map of nations into victor and vanquished; which annihilates the worshipers of alien gods.

the realm of the human—the thing which is both flesh and spirit; invisible and visible; earthly and transcendent.

“How is it possible,” Maharet asked in a low voice, “to break a cycle of violence through more wanton violence?

“It’s a lie, Akasha; it’s another superstitious lie! Have we not had enough of them? And now, of all times, when the world’s waking from its old delusions.

“I tell you, we would be hard put to determine what is more evil—religion or the pure idea. The intervention of the supernatural or the elegant simple abstract solution! Both have bathed this earth in suffering; both have brought the human race literally and figuratively to its knees.

Molecular; nucleonic; solitons; protoplasm; glittering modern words! Come now, we are vampires! We thrive on the blood of the living; we kill; and we love it. Whether we need to do it or not.

but real hauntings have nothing to do with ghosts finally; they have to do with the menace of memory;

“Lestat, it’s almost dawn.” “It’s almost dawn here,” I answered. “What do you mean?”

Tell me how bad I am. It makes me feel so good!”