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.

But I tried to subdue these little pains; or rather to ignore them as if they didn’t exist.

Perhaps she understood that sometimes, when we seek to prevent disaster, we play into its hands.

“Look out there at the forest!” he said, gesturing to the glass walls around us, “Pick one tree; describe it, if you will, in terms of what it destroys, what it defies, and what it does not accomplish, and you have a monster of greedy roots and irresistible momentum that eats the light of other plants, their nutrients, their air. But that is not the truth of the tree. That is not the whole truth when the thing is seen as part of nature, and by nature I mean nothing sacred, I mean only the full tapestry, Akasha. I mean only the larger thing which embraces all.”

“History is a litany of injustice, no one denies it. But when has a simple solution ever been anything but evil? Only in complexity do we find answers.

Through complexity men struggle towards fairness; it is slow and clumsy, but it’s the only way. Simplicity demands too great a sacrifice. It always has.”