The Queen of the Damned (The Vampire Chronicles, #3)

by Anne Rice

It’s an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater luster to our colors, a richer resonance to our words. That is, if it doesn’t destroy us, if it doesn’t burn away the optimism and the spirit, the capacity for visions, and the respect for simple yet indispensable things.

We live in a world of accidents finally, in which only aesthetic principles have a consistency of which we can be sure. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever, striving to create and maintain an ethical balance; but the shimmer of summer rain under the street lamps or the great flashing glare of artillery against a night sky—such brutal beauty is beyond dispute.

The horror of this, to be utterly unconnected.…

If the mind can find no meaning, then the senses give it. Live for this, wretched being that you are.

Surely Armand had read it, devouring every word in that eerie, horrible way he had of reading, of turning page after page without pause, eyes flashing over the words, until the book was finished, and then tossing it aside.

every social problem is observed in relation to ‘norms’ which in fact never existed, people fancy themselves ‘deprived’ of luxuries and peace and quiet which in fact were never common to any people anywhere at all.”

It is bound to produce some great fund of common knowledge, some new level of human awareness, a curious skepticism, to be so alone.”

Delicious, the prospect of secrets revealed only over a period of time.

And you must know we do not really change over time; we are as flowers unfolding, we merely become more nearly ourselves.”

How could the others resist? Surely the fierceness of their intended victim made him all the more inviting. The final message behind all Lestat’s lyrics was simple: Lestat had the gift that had been promised to each of them; Lestat was unkillable. He devoured the suffering forced upon him and emerged all the stronger. To join with him was to live forever: This is my Body. This is my Blood.

There isn’t a thing made that doesn’t fight for life, even when there is no real justification.

It occurred to him suddenly that he wasn’t very good at bitterness or regret, that he didn’t have the stamina for them, and if he was to recapture his dignity, he had better shape up fast.

We change, but we do not change, he thought. We grow wise, but we are fallible things! We are only human for however long we endure, that was the miracle and the curse of it.

“It doesn’t matter now. You fail to grasp how little anything matters. I give you no sublime reason for what I do because the reasons are simple and practical; how we came into being is irrelevant. What matters is that we have survived. Don’t you see? That is the utter beauty of it, the beauty out of which all other beauties will be born, that we have survived.”

I am anchored to the past by chains I cannot break.