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

by Anne Rice

it was as if when I looked into his eyes I was standing alone on the edge of the world … on a windswept ocean beach. There was nothing but the soft roar of the waves.

These experiences so overwhelmed and so changed my view of everything around me, from the picture of my brother on the parlor wall to the sight of a single star in the topmost pane of the French window, that I could not imagine another vampire taking them for granted. I was altered, permanently; I knew it. And what I felt, most profoundly, for everything, even the sound of the playing cards being laid down one by one upon the shining rows of the solitaire, was respect.

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I looked around me at all the mortals that I knew and saw all life as precious, condemning all fruitless guilt and passion that would let it slip through the fingers like sand.

And I would see her sweet and palpable before me, a shimmering, precious creature soon to grow old, soon to die, soon to lose these moments that in their intangibility promised to us, wrongly … wrongly, an immortality. As if it were our very birthright, which we could not come to grasp the meaning of until this time of middle life when we looked on only as many years ahead as already lay behind us. When every moment, every moment must be first known and then savored.

Beautiful writing! I never thought this book would focus so much on the deep realizations of an individual. It takes you so deep into what it means to be a vampire and the very deep meanings he came to know due to his transformation. I absolutely love this approach and didn't expect it to turn out this way.

For when I bring death, it is swift and consciousless, leaving the victim as if in enchanted sleep.

worse. It was as if this night were only one of thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into night to make a great arching line of which I couldn’t see the end, a night in which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars.

The faces of humans passed me like candle flames in the night dancing on dark waves. I was sinking into the darkness. I was weary of longing. I was turning around and around in the street, looking at the stars and thinking, Yes, it’s true. I know what he is saying is true, that when I kill there is no longing; and I can’t bear this truth. I can’t bear it.

‘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.’