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

by Anne Rice

The vampire was utterly white and smooth, as if he were sculpted from bleached bone, and his face was as seemingly inanimate as a statue, except for two brilliant green eyes that looked down at the boy intently like flames in a skull.

“You weren’t always a vampire, were you?”

“You mean … he sucked your blood?”

The devil was rampant.

“People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil.

He came in from the courtyard, opening the French doors without a sound, a tall fair-skinned man with a mass of blond hair and a graceful, almost feline quality to his movements.

I saw that he was no ordinary man at all.

I saw my life as if I stood apart from it, the vanity, the self-serving, the constant fleeing from one petty annoyance after another,

“And so you decided to become a vampire?”

“That morning, I was not yet a vampire. And I saw my last sunrise.

I became more and more aroused.

my enchantment with him was strained.

he sensed with an infallible instinct what was happening.

‘This is unbearable. I want to die. You have it in your power to kill me. Let me die.’

‘I want to die; kill me. Kill me,’

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

I was weak to paralysis.

I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body focused with the mind upon one vital source.

The boy sat as if frozen.

he was radiant, not luminous.

“It was as if I had only just been able to see colors and shapes for the first time.

“ ‘You’re dying, that’s all; don’t be a fool.

Lestat was never the vampire I am. Not at all.”

‘Oh, for the love of hell!’

“You mustn’t be so shy with me,”

Lestat moved through the night now like a cat

I was altered, permanently; I knew it.

“It sounds as if it was like being in love.”

“For the first time now I was fully and completely a vampire. I shut the wood blinds flat upon the small barred windows and bolted the door. Then I climbed into the satin-lined coffin, barely able to see the gleam of cloth in the darkness, and locked myself in. That is how I became a vampire.”

I achieved a somewhat consistent detachment.

he belittled me and attacked me for my love of the senses, my reluctance to kill, and the near swoon which killing could produce in me.

‘I’d like to meet the devil some night,’

There was no city in America like New Orleans.

the great growing class of the free people of color, those marvellous people of our mixed blood and that of the islands, who produced a magnificent and unique caste of craftsmen, artists, poets, and renowned feminine beauty.

to dine on the best of Spanish and French cooking and drink the imported wines of the world.

he could see like a cat,

The moon that rose over New Orleans then still rises.

The vampire appeared sad.

Lestat understood nothing.

“Even over all these years, I feel that anger for him like a white-hot liquid filling my veins.

Being a vampire for him meant revenge. Revenge against life itself. Every time he took a life it was revenge.

Vengeance, blind and sterile and contemptible.

in the glow of the candles their faces appeared as five soft, shimmering apparitions, each uniquely sad, each uniquely courageous.

What lay ahead was the final death of which Lestat was guilty.

Fortunately her husband was an idiot; a harmless one, but an idiot, the product of four generations of marriages between first cousins.

Slavery was the curse of their existence; but they had not been robbed yet of that which had been characteristically theirs.

No fear for the vampire.

We were devils. Our power inescapable. No, we must be destroyed.

You must defy them, but you must defy them with purity and confidence.’

But I found her more alluring than any woman I’d known in mortal life.