Interview with the Vampire (The Vampire Chronicles, #1)

by Anne Rice

the moment I saw him, saw his extraordinary aura and knew him to be no creature I’d ever known, I was reduced to nothing.

‘I remember it completely; yet I do not think I remember any other sunrise before it.

Lestat had overwhelmed me on my deathbed.

My desire to be thoroughly damned.

refused to look at him, to be spellbound by the sheer beauty of his appearance. He spoke my name to me softly, laughing.

his movement so graceful and so personal that at once it made me think of a lover.

I want you to be quiet, so quiet that you can almost hear the flow of blood through your veins, so quiet that you can hear the flow of that same blood through mine.

Above all, in my veins, drum and then the other drum; and then Lestat pulled his wrist free suddenly, and I opened my eyes and checked myself in a moment of reaching for his wrist, grabbing it, forcing it back to my mouth at all costs; I checked myself because I realized that the drum was my heart, and the second drum had been his.’

and don’t fall so madly in love with the night that you lose your way!”

“You’ll have to bed down with me this morning. I haven’t prepared you a coffin.” ’

‘Don’t angels gaze upon the face of God with complete love?’ The boy thought for a moment. ‘Love or adoration,’ he said. ‘What is the difference?’

I hated him and wanted to leave him; yet could I leave him?

Because all aesthetic decisions are moral, really.’

And I thought of what I always felt when I heard him coming, a vague anxiety, a vague need.

“Only that perhaps there was no will to live, no tenacity … because very simply there was no need of either.”

and how I suffered then, straining to remember the seas that a young man’s untutored senses had taken for granted, that an undisciplined memory had let slip away for eternity.

What can the damned really say to the damned?

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.

“As much as I hated him, with him we were … complete.”

I mean that my mind could only pull itself together, formulate thought out of the muddle of longing and pain, when it was touched by another mind;

and looking back on him, as it seemed I was always doing, I saw him more kindly than before.

If you knew how he drinks death you’d hate him more than you ever hated Lestat.

all I want here is a certain space, a certain peace. Or not to be here at all.

Your evil is that you cannot be evil, and I must suffer for it. I tell you, I will suffer no longer!”

Turn around, I’ll make you look at me with those eyes that want him, I’ll make you listen.”

I supposed in my colossal conceit and self-deception that my own grief for my dead brother was the only true emotion.

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.

‘What would Christ need have done to make me follow him like Matthew or Peter? Dress well, to begin with. And have a luxu...

‘I wanted desperately to talk to him, to stop him with both my hands on his shoulders, merely to look into his eyes again as I’d done that last night, to fix him in some time and place, so that I could deal with the excitement inside me.

‘I wasn’t sure what frightened me more, the climb itself or the notion of being seen as a ghost;

he excited me in other ways which resembled fear.

“I never shunned you,” I said, trying to hide the excitement these words produced in me.

“I want you. I want you more than anything in the world.”

“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.

“If there weren’t one single work of art left in this world … and there are thousands … if there weren’t a single natural beauty … if the world were reduced to one empty cell and one fragile candle, I can’t help but see you studying that candle,

I wish I had the artist’s power to bring alive for you the Venice of the fifteenth century, my master’s palace there, the love I felt for him when I was a mortal boy, and the love he felt for me when he made me a vampire.

No, I’ve had to wait and watch for you. And now I’ll fight for you. Do you see how ruthless I am in love? Is this what you meant by love?”

I was crying out for Armand.

‘And then I saw Lestat – the blow that was more crippling than any blow.

“You come back to me, Louis,” he said.

and as soon as our eyes met I wished the world were not one black empty ruin of ashes and death. I wished it were fresh and beautiful, and that we were both living and had love to give each other.

“I told you, it was the actual reason and it was the least true,”

“Yes,” I said softly to him, “that is the crowning evil, that we can even go so far as to love each other, you and I. And who else would show us a particle of love, a particle of compassion or mercy?

‘He thought it a very simple request. He said only he wondered why I had waited so long.’

And I, being aware in a gentlemanly manner that I did little to please him and often went for long periods without really speaking to him or seeking him out, wanted to do this because he asked me.

Lestat, in fact, had aroused in me feelings which I hadn’t wished to confide in anyone,

‘You’ve forgotten. You don’t even understand the meaning of your own story, what it means to a human being like me.’