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

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.

which I found as necessary as penance from the confessional, truly hoping death would find me unawares and render me fit for eternal pardon.

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

He was the sow’s ear out of which nothing fine could be made.

‘I’d like to meet the devil some night,’ he said once with a malignant smile. ‘I’d chase him from here to the wilds of the Pacific. I am the devil.’

For when I bring death, it is swift and consciousless, leaving the victim as if in enchanted sleep. But this was the slow decay, the body refusing to surrender to the vampire of time which had sucked upon it for years on end.

‘Put out the light … and then put out the light,’

You will be filled, Louis, as you were meant to be, with all the life that you can hold; and you will have hunger when that’s gone for the same, and the same, and the same. The red in this glass will be just as red;

‘I’ll feel as I felt with her, wed to her and weightless, caught as if by a dance.’

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.

Yet more and more her doll-like face seemed to possess two totally aware adult eyes, and innocence seemed lost somewhere with neglected toys and the loss of a certain patience.

‘It’s a string which is pulling me through the labyrinth. I am not pulling the string. The string is pulling me.…’

‘You saw me in the lamplight,’ I said to him. ‘And my face looked to you like the mask of death.’

‘I’ll put you in your coffin, Father,’ she said, as though she were soothing him. ‘I’ll put you in it forever.’ And then, from beneath the pillows of the couch, she drew a kitchen knife.

I felt a pull suddenly, as if some force were urging me to go down with him, to descend into the dark water and never come back. It was so distinct and so strong that it made the articulation of voices seem only a murmur by comparison. It spoke without language, saying, ‘You know what you must do. Come down into the darkness. Let it all go away.’

‘Bless me, father, for I have sinned, sinned so often and so long I do not know how to change, nor how to confess before God what I’ve done.’

What can the damned really say to the damned?

the risk of any question that is truthfully asked; for the answer must carry an incalculable price,

Only the doll had a human face, only the doll.

so that the earth on that spot, so shaped by blood and consciousness, had ceased to be the earth and had become Paris.

and Death showed a beaming white face to the audience, his hurried hands stroking his handsome black hair, straightening a waistcoat, brushing imaginary dust from his lapels. Death in love.

It seemed more than ever absurd to me that Lestat should have died, if in fact he had; and looking back on him, as it seemed I was always doing, I saw him more kindly than before. Lost like the rest of us. Not the jealous protector of any knowledge he was afraid to share. He knew nothing. There was nothing to know.

And again came that thought: I have wronged Lestat, I have hated him for all the wrong reasons.

to be born like Venus out of the foam,

‘Do you think I would leave you in danger?’ “She was smiling. For a moment I didn’t believe my eyes. ‘No, you would not, Louis. You would not. Danger holds you to me.…’ “ ‘Love holds me to you,’ I said softly.

What right had I to be so bitterly disappointed in Lestat that I would let him die! Because he wouldn’t show me what I must find in myself?

Knowledge would never be withheld by Armand, I knew it. It would pass through him as through a pane of glass so that I might bask in it and absorb it and grow.

And sometime during the few hours that remained of the night I found myself at the open window, feeling the slow mist of the rain. It glistened on the fronds of the ferns, on sweet white flowers that listed, bowed, and finally broke from their stems. A carpet of flowers littering the little balcony, the petals pounded softly by the rain.

It was guilt that was consuming her, not love. It was guilt—that shop of dolls Claudia had described to me, shelves and shelves of the effigy of that dead child. But guilt that absolutely understood the finality of death.

A sleep as heavy as death will come over my limbs, and I won’t be able to solace you.

‘For you see,’ I said to her in that same calm voice, ‘what died tonight in this room was not that woman. It will take her many nights to die, perhaps years. What has died in this room tonight is the last vestige in me of what was human.’

Forgive me, but it amazes me, how in your complexity you are so profoundly simple.’

I am evil with infinite gradations and without guilt.’

I was bent on it now, possessed only of some vague notion that in works of art I could find some solace while bringing nothing of death to what was inanimate and yet magnificently possessed of the spirit of life itself.