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?”

Somber, yes, but light and beauty come together in you in a thousand different patterns.”

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.

We breathe the light, we breathe the music, we breathe the moment as it passes through us.

“A singer can shatter a glass with the proper high note,” he said, “but the simplest way for anyone to break a glass is simply to drop it on the floor.”

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.” “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.”

The truth is most women are weak, be they mortal or immortal. But when they are strong, they are absolutely unpredictable.”

Old truths and ancient magic, revolution and invention, all conspire to distract us from the passion that in one way or another defeats us all.