The Vampire Lestat (The Vampire Chronicles, #2)

by Anne Rice

It came to that one night when we were in the inn again, and we were drunk as usual. In fact we were at that moment of drunkenness that the two of us had come to call the Golden Moment, when everything made sense. We always tried to stretch out that moment, and then inevitably one of us would confess, “I can’t follow anymore, I think the Golden Moment’s passed.”

“I can live without God. I can even come to live with the idea there is no life after. But I do not think I could go on if I did not believe in the possibility of goodness.

I was awake and I was very thirsty. I wanted a great deal of very cold white wine, the way it is when you bring it up out of the cellar in autumn. I wanted something fresh and sweet to eat, like a ripe apple.

What had I thought I was, a righteous partner to the judges and executioners of Paris who strike down the poor for crimes that the rich commit every day?

“We write our own fairy tales, my love,” I said. “The lesson in this is that nothing can destroy what you are now. Every wound will heal. You are a goddess.” “And the goddess thirsts,” she said.

Gabrielle 🙌

Well, I was very quickly to learn an important lesson about mortals and their willingness to be convinced that the world is a safe place.

I looked at her coldly. “I don’t know how to be bad at being bad.”

On our way back to Cairo when we came to the great Colossi of Memnon, she told in a passionate whisper how Roman emperors had journeyed to marvel at these statues just as we did now. “They were ancient in the times of the Caesars,” she said, as we rode our camels through the cool sands.

Stick it directly in my veins

“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.” “So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions.” “An absence of need for illusions,” he said. “A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes.”

Marius is a humanist

“The common people of those days,” he said, “still believed in religion just as they do now. And for them it was custom, superstition, elemental magic, the use of ceremonies whose origins were lost in antiquity, just as it is today. But the world of those who originated ideas—those who ruled and advanced the course of history—was a godless and hopelessly sophisticated world like that of Europe in this day and age.” “When I read Cicero and Ovid and Lucretius, it seemed so to me,” I said. He nodded and gave a little shrug. “It has taken eighteen hundred years,” he said, “to come back to the skepticism, the level of practicality that was our daily frame of mind then.

I do not remember when it became the twentieth century, only that everything was uglier and darker, and the beauty I’d known in the old eighteenth-century days seemed more than ever some kind of fanciful idea. The bourgeois ran the world now upon dreary principles and with a distrust of the sensuality and the excess that the ancient regime had so loved.

What are we but leeches now—loathsome, secretive, without justification. The old romance is gone. So let us take on a new meaning. I crave the bright lights as I crave blood. I crave the divine visibility. I crave war.”