The Witching Hour (Lives of the Mayfair Witches, #1)

by Anne Rice

It had been the golden time of evening when the sun is gone and everything gives back the light it has absorbed all day long.

and she could drift in this delicious exhaustion, savoring the taste of the cigarette, and the awful coffee, and the lovely glare of the light on the beautifully blank walls.

For now, rest in this great ship called the hospital, for that is exactly what it felt like—a submarine, traveling without sound through time. The lights never went out. The temperature never varied. The engines never shut down. And we, the crew, are bonded together, in spite of anger, or resentment, or competition. We are bonded and there is a form of love whether we acknowledge it or not.

You survived by being brilliant and courageous and perfect, because there was simply no other way to survive, and every moment in the Operating Room was a mortal test.

She’d been ten or twelve years old before she realized other people didn’t have it, sometimes not even a particle of it. That her beloved Ellie, for instance, didn’t have the slightest idea that Graham did not love her so much as he needed her, and needed to denigrate her and lie to her and to depend on her always being there, and being inferior to him.

One did not become a good neurosurgeon by dwelling for very long on one’s mistakes. The appropriate thing, and the instinctive thing for Rowan, was to assess the error for what it was, consider how to avoid it in the future,

and then to go on from there.

“His name and his life story are not important for the moment. But what characterized his account was that it was curiously secular for the times. He was perhaps the only historian

ever to write about the occult, or the unseen, or the mysterious without making assumptions and assertions as to the demonic origin of apparitions, spirits, and the like. And of his small band of followers he demanded the same open-mindedness. ‘Merely study the work of the so-called spell binder,’ he would say. ‘Do not assume you know whence his power comes.’