The Vampire Lestat (The Vampire Chronicles, #2)

by Anne Rice

Also there was something vampiric about rock music. It must have sounded supernatural even to those who don’t believe in the supernatural.

All the more reason for me to bring the book and the band called The Vampire Lestat to fame as quickly as possible. I had to find Louis. I had to talk to him. In fact, after reading his account of things, I ached for him, ached for his romantic illusions, and even his dishonesty. I ached even for his gentlemanly malice and his physical presence, the deceptively soft sound of his voice.

“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?”

“I’ve lived all these years among those who create nothing and change nothing,” I said. “Actors and musicians—they’re saints to me.”

and even in moments of exquisite happiness there was the darkness lurking, the sense of our frailty and our hopelessness.

“Lestat, no talk of the eternal, the immutable, the unknowable!” He threatened to hit me or shake me if I should start.

“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.

and then the hatred of her and the need of her, and the losing of her behind a thousand closed doors, and cruel answers, and the terror of her and her complexity and her indifference and her indefinable strength.

“I want to know, for example, why beauty exists,” she said, “why nature continues to contrive it, and what is the link between the life of a tree and its beauty, and what connects the mere existence of the sea or a lightning storm with the feelings these things inspire in us?

And the other secret, which he kept from his followers for their sake, was simply the extent of his ever deepening despair. That he craved nothing, cherished nothing, believed nothing finally, and took not one particle of pleasure

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

“Akasha,” I said aloud. I heard the name at the same moment of speaking it. And it sounded lovely to me. The hairs rose all over me.

“And now we stand again on the cusp of an atheistic age—an age where the Christian faith is losing its hold, as paganism once lost its hold, and the new humanism, the belief in man and his accomplishments and his rights, is more powerful than ever before.

I took a deep breath and looked away from him, wishing I could say what I really wanted to say. That I loved him. But I couldn’t do that. The feeling was too strong.

“That music of yours could wake the dead.”