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by
Anne Rice
Read between
November 5, 2024 - January 2, 2025
And I have a fairly short narrow nose, and a mouth that is well shaped but just a little too big for my face. It can look very mean, or extremely generous, my mouth. It always looks sensual. But emotions and attitudes are always reflected in my entire expression. I have a continuously animated face.
he thinks he's y/n
“Lestat, we’re partners in sin,” he said, smiling finally. “We’ve always been. We’ve both behaved badly, both been utterly disreputable. It’s what binds us together.”
fortnight
ah shit
Mark my words, nothing on earth can end your life save the sun, or a blaze such as you see before you, and even then, only, and I say, only if your ashes are scattered when it is done.
Do devils love each other?
It had terrified me as a child, the idea that I might go to heaven and my mother might go to hell and that I should hate her. I couldn’t hate her. And what if we were in hell together? Well, now I know, whether I believe in hell or not, that vampires can love each other, that in being dedicated to evil, one does not cease to love.
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.
But we could never discuss these things now with each other. We could never again be in the inn. Forgive me, Nicki. Good and evil exist still, as they always will. But “our conversation” is over forever.
How to describe what humans look like to us! I’ve tried to describe it a little, when I spoke of Nicki’s beauty the night before as a mixture of movement and color. But you can’t imagine what it’s like for us to look on living flesh. There are those billions of colors and tiny configurations of movement, yes, that make up a living creature on whom we concentrate. But the radiance mingles totally with the carnal scent. Beautiful, that’s what any human being is to us, if we stop to consider it, even the old and the diseased, the downtrodden that one doesn’t really “see” in the street. They are
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Well, I saw all this when I saw Nicki, and I smelled the blood pumping in him, and for one heady moment I felt love and only love obliterating every recollection of the horrors that had deformed me. Every evil rapture, every new power with its gratification, seemed unreal. Maybe I felt a profound joy, too, that I could still love, if I’d ever doubted it, and that a tragic victory had been confirmed.
I hide nothing from you, not my ignorance, not my fear, not the simple terror that if I try I might fail. I do not even know if it is mine to give more than once, or what is the price of giving it, but I will risk this for you, and we will discover it together, whatever the mystery and the terror, just as I’ve discovered alone all else.
Death was my commander and I gave him a thousand victims, but I’d snatched her right out of his hand.
“I cannot overcome this notion that I’ve died,” she said. “That I am utterly cut off from all living creatures. I can taste, I can see, I can feel. I can drink blood. But I am like something that cannot be seen, cannot affect things.”
“For half a year I’ve been what I am. God and Satan have not troubled me! It is you who trouble me!”
“But those who rose, ah, those were the vampires who walked the earth, tested, purified, Children of Darkness, born of a fledgling’s blood, never, the full power of an ancient master, so that time would bring the wisdom to use the Dark Gifts before they grew truly strong. And on these were imposed the Rules of Darkness. To live among the dead, for we are dead things, returning always to one’s own grave or one very nearly like it. To shun the places of light, luring victims away from the company of others to suffer death in unholy and haunted places. And to honor forever the power of God, the
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“Why should Death lurk in the shadows? Why should Death wait at the gate? There is no bedchamber, no ballroom that I cannot enter. Death in the glow of the hearth, Death on tiptoe in the corridor, that is what I am. Speak to me of the Dark Gifts—I use them. I’m Gentleman Death in silk and lace, come to put out the candles. The canker in the heart of the rose.”
“From the first nights when I held them close to me, I loved them. Drinking up their life, their death, I love them. Dear God, is that not the very essence of the Dark Gift?”
“Oh, what are you that you do not? What vile things that this is the sum of your wisdom, the simple capacity to feel!”
And we do breathe. We breathe and we taste and we smell and we feel and we thirst.
Now, my love, now’s the moment. I can swallow the life that beats from your heart and send you into the oblivion in which nothing may ever be understood or forgiven, or I can bring you to me.
The Dark Trick never brings love, you see, it brings only the silence. His voice seemed softer in its soundlessness, clearer, the echo dissipated. We used to say it was Satan’s will, that the master and the fledgling not seek comfort in each other. It was Satan who had to be served, after all.
They never satisfy you, the ones you make. In silence the estrangement and the resentment only grow.
Love and love and love in the vampire kiss.
“This is the only sun that you will ever see again. But a millennium of nights will be yours to see light as no mortal has ever seen it, to snatch from the distant stars as if you were Prometheus an endless illumination by which to understand all things.”
One—that each coven must have its leader and only he might order the working of the Dark Trick upon a mortal, seeing that the methods and the rituals were properly observed.
Two—that the Dark Gifts must never be given to the crippled, the maimed, or to children, or to those who cannot, even with the Dark Powers, survive on their own. Be it further understood that all mortals who would receive the Dark Gifts should be beautiful in person so that the insult to God might be greater when the Dark Trick is done.
Three—that never should an old vampire work this magic lest the blood of the ...
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Four—that no vampire may ever destroy another vampire, except that the coven master has the power of life and death over all of his flock.
Five—that no vampire shall ever reveal his true nature to a mortal and allow that mortal to live. No vampire must ever reveal the history of the vampires to a mortal and let the mortal live. No vampire must commit to writing the history of the vampires or any true knowledge of vampires lest such a history be found by mortals and believed. And a vampire’s name must never be known to mortals, save from his tombstone, and never must any vampire reveal to mortals the location of his or any other vampire’s lair.
“I do not know why I go on. I do not search for truth. I do not believe in it. I hope for no ancient secrets from you, whatever they may be. But I believe in something. Maybe simply in the beauty of the world through which I wander or in the will to live itself. This gift was given to me too early. It was given for no good reason. And already at the age of thirty mortal years, I have some understanding as to why so many of our kind have wasted it, given it up. Yet I continue. And I search for you.”
“What can I say finally that will not confirm your worst fears? I have lived over eighteen hundred years, and I tell you life does not need us. I have never had a true purpose. We have no place.”
“We had our Eden under that ancient cemetery,” he hissed. “We had our faith and our purpose. And it was you who drove us out of it with a flaming sword. What do we have now! Answer me! Nothing but the love of each other and what can that mean to creatures like us!”
“One thing, Louis,” I said. “Yes?” “Those clothes. Impossible. I mean, tomorrow night, as they say in the twentieth century, you will lose that sweater and those pants.”
this is the gayest shit he has ever said
