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by
Anne Rice
“People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don’t know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.
He came in from the courtyard, opening the French doors without a sound, a tall fair-skinned man with a mass of blond hair and a graceful, almost feline quality to his movements.
All my conceptions, even my guilt and wish to die, seemed utterly unimportant. I completely forgot myself!”
I saw my real gods … the gods of most men. Food, drink, and security in conformity. Cinders.”
I checked myself because I realized that the drum was my heart, and the second drum had been his.” The vampire sighed.
I am the devil.’
When every moment, every moment must be first known and then savored.
Being a vampire for him meant revenge. Revenge against life itself. Every time he took a life it was revenge.
Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort.
The conflict lies between the morals of the artist and the morals of society, not between aesthetics and morality.
And we must live with the knowledge that there is no knowledge.’
Winter plums. Plums from an enchanted wood where the fruit never falls from the boughs. Where the flowers never wither and die.
“The great adventure of our lives. What does it mean to die when you can live until the end of the world? And what is ‘the end of the world’ except a phrase, because who knows even what is the world itself?
‘Exactly, and consequently if you believe God made Satan, you must realize that all Satan’s power comes from God and that Satan is simply God’s child, and that we are God’s children also. There are no children of Satan, really’
‘But if evil is without gradation, and it does exist, this state of evil, then only one sin is needed. Isn’t that what you are saying? That God exists and.…’
‘That’s not true. Because if God doesn’t exist we are the creatures of highest consciousness in the universe. We alone understand the passage of time and the value of every minute of human life. And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would have died tomorrow or the day after or eventually … it doesn’t matter. Because if God does not exist, this life … every second of it … is all we have.’
I can now accept the most fantastical truth of all: that there is no meaning to any of this!’
I have wronged Lestat, I have hated him for all the wrong reasons.
‘I’ve searched for them the world over, and I despise them!’
Nor try to separate that loss from some other oppressive realization: that in Europe I’d found no truths to lessen loneliness, transform despair. Rather, I’d found only the inner workings of my own small soul, the pain of Claudia’s, and a passion for a vampire who was perhaps more evil than Lestat, for whom I became as evil as Lestat, but in whom I saw the only promise of good in evil of which I could conceive.
I allowed myself to forget how totally I had fallen in love with Lestat’s iridescent eyes, that I’d sold my soul for a many-colored and luminescent thing, thinking that a highly reflective surface conveyed the power to walk on water.
‘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.’
You reflect your age differently. You reflect its broken heart.’
Lestat, in fact, had aroused in me feelings which I hadn’t wished to confide in anyone, feelings I’d wished to forget, despite Claudia’s death. Hatred had not been one of them.
I had to wait a long time for the particular kind I wanted—a man who had killed other mortals and showed no remorse.
But after the third night up, I was roaring around New Orleans on a big black Harley-Davidson motorcycle making plenty of noise myself. I was looking for more killers to feed on. I wore gorgeous black leather clothes that I’d taken from my victims, and I had a little Sony Walkman stereo in my pocket that fed Bach’s Art of the Fugue through tiny earphones right into my head as I blazed along. I was the vampire Lestat again. I was back in action. New Orleans was once again my hunting ground.
Hell yeah
For the first time in history, perhaps, they were as strong and as interesting as men.
And no small part of this unpredicted miracle was the curious innocence of these people in the very midst of their freedom and their wealth. The Christian god was as dead as he had been in the 1700s. And no new mythological religion had arisen to take the place of the old.
I did a lot of thinking about this sinless secular morality, this optimism. This brilliantly lighted world where the value of human life was greater than it had ever been before.
IT WAS enough to make an Old World monster go back into the earth, this stunning irrelevance to the mighty scheme of things, enough to make him lie down and weep. Or enough to make him become a rock singer, when you think about it.…
And more than ever, I was resolute that I would not drink innocent blood.
I had to find Louis. I had to talk to him. In fact, after reading his account of things, I ached for him, ached for his romantic illusions, and even his dishonesty. I ached even for his gentlemanly malice and his physical presence, the deceptively soft sound of his voice.
Of course I hated him for the lies he told about me. But the love was far greater than the hate.
he was my companion as no other immortal ...
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Even at the moment of destruction, I would be alive as I have never been.
And I’d been born restless—the dreamer, the angry one, the complainer.
