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

by Anne Rice

I had only begun to understand it, and wished to save the experience of human death for my mature understanding. But it was moral. Because all aesthetic decisions are moral, really.” “I don’t understand,” said the boy. “I thought aesthetic decisions could be completely immoral. What about the cliché of the artist who leaves his wife and children so he can paint? Or Nero playing the harp while Rome burned?” “Both were moral decisions. Both served a higher good, in the mind of the artist. The conflict lies between the morals of the artist and the morals of society, not between aesthetics and morality.

Let the flesh instruct the mind.

“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?

What does it mean to die when you can live until the end of the world?

‘Why does that make you as evil as any vampire? Aren’t there gradations of evil? Is evil a great perilous gulf into which one falls with the first sin, plummeting to the depth?’

‘I am mortal again,’ I whispered to him. ‘I am alive. With your blood I am alive.’ His eyes closed. I sank back against the wall and found myself gazing at my own face.

‘Don’t you look away from me! I am sick at heart with your looking away, with your suffering. You understand nothing. Your evil is that you cannot be evil, and I must suffer for it. I tell you, I will suffer no longer!’

it seemed then the only emotion of which I was still capable: hatred of self. I love them. I hate them. I do not care if they are there.

‘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.’

Look at you,’ I found myself answering. ‘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, absorbed in the flicker of its light, the change of its colors … how long could that sustain you … what possibilities would it create? Am I wrong? Am I such a crazed idealist?’