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

by Anne Rice

‘Evil is a point of view,’ he whispered now. ‘We are immortal. And what we have before us are the rich feasts that conscience cannot appreciate and mortal men cannot know without regret. God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering His earth and all its kingdoms.

I wanted to forget him, and yet it seemed I thought of him always. It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I’d envision his face—not as it had been the last night in the fire, but on other nights, that last evening he spent with us at home, his hand playing idly with the keys of the spinet, his head tilted to one side. A sickness rose in me more wretched than anguish when I saw what my dreams were doing. I wanted him alive! In the dark nights of eastern Europe, Lestat was the only vampire I’d found.

Do you know what it means to be loved by Death?’ He all but kissed her face, the brilliant stain of her tears. ‘Do you know what it means to have Death know your name?’

“You sense my loneliness,” I answered, “my bitterness at being shut out of life. My bitterness that I’m evil, that I don’t deserve to be loved and yet I need love hungrily.

This knowledge may change you somewhat. That’s all knowledge ever really does, I suppose …”

“But when I’ve given all I have to give, you will be exactly where you were before: an immortal being who must find his own reasons to exist.”

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.

“You have few preconceptions,” he said. “In fact, you astound me because you admit to such extraordinary simplicity. You want a purpose. You want love.”

“To be godless is probably the first step to innocence,” he said, “to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost.” “So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions.” “An absence of need for illusions,” he said. “A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes.”

“It’s only terrible as time goes on,” he said. “In the beginning, it’s beautiful.”

And now we stand again on the cusp of an atheistic age—an age where the Christian faith is losing its hold, as paganism once lost its hold, and the new humanism, the belief in man and his accomplishments and his rights, is more powerful than ever before.

And when you make others—and you will, out of loneliness, make others—make and keep them as human as you can. Keep them close to you as members of a family, not as members of a coven, and understand the age you live in, the decades you pass through.

Understand what it means to feel the passage of time!” “Yes, and feel all the pain of seeing things die …” All the things Armand advised against. “Of course. You are made to triumph over time, not to run from it.

“Whatever will happen will happen, but choose your companions with care. Choose them because you like to look at them and you like the sound of their voices, and they have profound secrets in them that you wish to know. In other words, choose them because you love them. Otherwise you will not be able to bear their company for very long.” “I understand,” I said. “Make them in love.”

Old truths and ancient magic, revolution and invention, all conspire to distract us from the passion that in one way or another defeats us all. And weary finally of this complexity, we dream of that long-ago time when we sat upon our mother’s knee and each kiss was the perfect consummation of desire. What can we do but reach for the embrace that must now contain both heaven and hell: our doom again and again and again.

Sheer will had shaped my experience more than any other human characteristic.

And advice and predictions notwithstanding, I courted tragedy and disaster as I have always done. Yet I had my rewards, I can’t deny that. For almost seventy years I had my fledgling vampires Louis and Claudia,

Shortly after reaching the colony, I fell fatally in love with Louis, a young dark-haired bourgeois planter, graceful of speech and fastidious of manner, who seemed in his cynicism and self-destructiveness the very twin of Nicolas.

But I loved him, plain and simple. And it was out of the desperation to keep him, to bind him closer to me at the most precarious of moments, that I committed the most selfish and impulsive act of my entire life among the living dead. It was the crime that was to be my undoing: the creation with Louis and for Louis of Claudia, a stunningly beautiful vampire child.

And in a real way, Louis was always the sum of his flaws, the most beguilingly human fiend I have ever known.

And I cannot say even now that I regret Claudia, that I wish I had never seen her, nor held her, nor whispered secrets to her, nor heard her laughter echoing through the shadowy gaslighted rooms of that all too human town house in which we moved amid the lacquered furniture and the darkening oil paintings and the brass flowerpots as living beings should. Claudia was my dark child, my love, evil of my evil. Claudia broke my heart.

I don’t blame her. It was the sort of thing I might have done myself.

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

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?

“Do you remember the morning that you went into the chapel,” she continued, “and you knelt on the bare marble floor, with your arms out in the form of the cross, and you told God you would do anything if only he would make you good?” “Yes, good.…” Now it was my voice that was tinged with bitterness. “You said you would suffer martyrdom; torments unspeakable; it did not matter; if only you were to be someone who was good.” “Yes, I remember.” I saw the old saints; I heard the hymns that had broken my heart. I remembered the morning my brothers had come to take me home, and I had begged them on my knees to let me stay there.

“Free to die?” Marius responded. “We are always free to die, aren’t we? What we must have now is the courage to do it, if indeed it is the right thing to do.”

“I’ve always been my own teacher,” I said soberly. “And I must confess I’ve always been my favorite pupil as well.”

You’ve awakened me from my long sleep and to my great purpose; it gives me joy merely to look at you,

Again. Lestat only being found valuable for his looks.

we ate the flesh of our dead.”

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