More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I would have kissed her, but I was suddenly distracted. I squeezed her hand too tightly.
THAT'S YOUR MOTHER
“If you leave me now with this one,” he continued, “you will do it again. Nicolas you never possessed. And she already wonders how she will ever get free of you. And unlike her, you cannot stand to be alone.”
Be it further understood that all mortals who would receive the Dark Gifts should be beautiful in person
No ugly people allowed ig
“You’ve been the slave of everything that ever claimed you.”
not quite
“Yes, always in God,” he answered. “It is Satan—our master—who is the fiction and that is the fiction which has betrayed me.”
I loved him. I knew it, as incomprehensible to me as he was. But I was so glad it was finished. So glad that we could go on.
Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which men want to live.”
And though his violin was given him in his cell, his hands were taken away.
WHAT
Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds—justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can’t go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.
“To be godless is probably the first step to innocence,” he said, “to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost.”
“And slowly I turned my eyes in the direction of the door, and it was a woman I saw standing there. And not merely a woman, but a magnificent bronze-skinned Egyptian woman as artfully bejeweled and dressed as the old queens, in fine pleated linen, with her black hair down to her shoulders and braided with strands of gold.
Shortly after reaching the colony, I fell fatally in love with Louis, a young dark-haired bourgeois planter, graceful of speech and fastidious of manner, who seemed in his cynicism and self-destructiveness the very twin of Nicolas. He had Nicki’s grim intensity, his rebelliousness, his tortured capacity to believe and not to believe, and finally to despair.
But I loved him, plain and simple. And it was out of the desperation to keep him, to bind him closer to me at the most precarious of moments, that I committed the most selfish and impulsive act of my entire life among the living dead. It was the crime that was to be my undoing: the creation with Louis and for Louis of Claudia, a stunningly beautiful vampire child.
And in a real way, Louis was always the sum of his flaws, the most beguilingly human fiend I have ever known. Even Marius could not have imagined such a compassionate and contemplative creature, always the gentleman, even teaching Claudia the proper use of table silver when she, bless her little black heart, had not the slightest need ever to touch a knife or a fork.
I betrayed him when I created him, that is the significant thing. Just as I betrayed Claudia. And I forgive the nonsense he wrote, because he told the truth about the eerie contentment he and Claudia and I shared
I had what I wanted, what I had always wanted. I had them.
I wanted to do it. I wanted to see what would happen, I mean, with a beautiful little girl like that!
Oh
Claudia was my dark child, my love, evil of my evil. Claudia broke my heart.
And finally starvation as I lay on the floor of a brick-lined cell, unable even to shout curses at him, the darkness full of the vibrations of the passing omnibuses and tramcars, penetrated again and again by the distant screech of iron wheels.
“You will declare it before the others, that she did it,” he said. And the others, the new ones, came to the door to look at me one by one.
was screaming for Louis.
What did it have to do with justice? Why did I hold this thing, this little dress?
And I realized it was a lie he’d told me in Paris about Louis. Louis had been with Armand all these years. And Louis had been looking for me. Louis had been downtown in the old city looking for me near the town house where we had lived for so long. Louis had come finally to this very place and seen me through the windows.
And I only vaguely remember Armand letting me know that Louis was leaving him and he, Armand, did not want to go on.
YESSSSSSS
“I can’t love you. What are you to me that I should love you? A dead thing that hungers for the power and the passion of others? The embodiment of thirst itself?”
We embraced the way we never had in the past. We held each other the way Gabrielle and I used to do. And then I ran my hands over his hair and his face, just letting myself really see him, as if he belonged to me. And he did the same.
