The Vampire Lestat (The Vampire Chronicles, #2)

by Anne Rice

“It was the same the first time I bore a child,” she said. “I was in agony for twelve hours, and I felt trapped in the pain, knowing the only release was the birth or my own death. When it was over, I had your brother Augustin in my arms, but I didn’t want anyone else near me. And it wasn’t because I blamed them. It was only that I’d suffered like that, hour after hour, that I’d gone into the circle of hell and come back out. They hadn’t been in the circle of hell. And I felt quiet all over. In this common occurrence, this vulgar act of giving birth, I understood the meaning of utter loneliness.”

She spoke in an almost eerie way of my being a secret part of her anatomy, of my being the organ for her which women do not really have. “You are the man in me,” she said. “And so I’ve kept you here, afraid of living without you, and maybe now in sending you away, I am only doing what I have done before.”

And what was he really saying to us beneath this liquid flow of beautiful language: Come to me, and I shall be the sun round which you are locked in orbit, and my rays shall lay bare the secrets you keep from each other, and I, who possess charms and powers of which you have no inkling, shall control and possess and destroy you!

Crazy Ass

“I’ve been a rebel always,” I said. “You’ve been the slave of everything that ever claimed you.”