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

by Anne Rice

I saw my real gods … the gods of most men. Food, drink, and security in conformity. Cinders.”

I failed to realize that their experience with the supernatural was far greater than that of white men. In my own inexperience I still thought of them as childlike savages barely domesticated by slavery.

‘You’ll die if you do that,’ Lestat was saying. ‘He’ll suck you right down into death with him if you cling to him in death.

I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another.

The strong overpowering emotions of detached persons in whom emotion and will are one,”

Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort. And the balance by which she lived might be upset if she were to question her own goodness.

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.

‘And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand.

When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength. A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth … and whoever slayeth thee, vengeance shall be taken on him seven-fold.’

I am not mortal, father, but immortal and damned, like angels put in hell by God. I am a vampire.’

she was, as always in the past, a person of little indecision,

a person for whom habitual quiet did not mean anxiety or regret.

‘Louis, your quest is for darkness only. This sea is not your sea. The myths of men are not your myths. Men’s treasures are not yours.’

‘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.’

vampires had not made such horrors themselves but merely collected them, confirming over and over that men were capable of far greater evil than vampires.

The measure of my hatred is that love. They are the same! Do you know now how much I hate you!’