The Vampire Lestat (The Vampire Chronicles, #2)

by Anne Rice

“And won’t the world be better if no one is ever again burnt in the name of God?” I asked. “If there is no more faith in God to make men do that to each other? What is the danger in a secular world where horrors like that don’t happen?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll see a splendid city where great ideas are born in the minds of the populace, ideas that go forth to illuminate the darkened corners of this world.” “Ah, you are a dreamer!” he said, but he was delighted. He was beyond handsome when he smiled.

Beauty wasn’t the treachery he imagined it to be, rather it was an uncharted land where one could make a thousand fatal errors, a wild and indifferent paradise without signposts of evil or good. In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art—the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard’s canvases—beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.

.

“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.”

poetry. Osiris was a good god to the Egyptians, a god of the corn. What has this to do with us?

"Politics??! Whats that to do with us?

If there was not meaning, at least there was the luster of congruence, the stunning repetition of the same old theme.