The Vampire Armand Quotes

“You’re mine, of my flesh and of my blood.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“My Master’s face was rapt and beautiful, a white flame against the wavering golden light of countless candles. He stood over me.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“I prayed for it, Andrei. I prayed they wouldn’t get you for their filthy catacombs, their dark earthen cells. Well, so my prayer is answered! Go with God, Andrei. Go with God. Go with God!”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“Clad in red velvet it came, the very covering my old Master had so loved, the dream king, Marius. It came swaggering and camping through the lighted streets of Paris as though God had made it.

But it was a vampire child, the same as I, son of the seventeen hundreds, as they reckoned the time to be then, a blazing, brash, bumbling, laughing and teasing blood drinker in the guise of a young man, come to stomp out whatever sacred fire yet burnt in the cleft scar tissue of my soul and scatter the ashes.

It was The Vampire Lestat. It wasn't his fault. Had one of us been able to strike him down one night, break him apart with his own fancy sword and set him ablaze, we might have had a few more decades of our wretched delusions.

But nobody could. He was too damned strong for us.

Created by a powerful and ancient renegade, a legendary vampire by the name of Magnus, this Lestat, aged twenty in mortal years, an errant and penniless country aristocrat from the wild lands of Auvergne, who had thrown over custom and respectability and any hope of court ambitions, of which he had none anyway since he couldn't even read or write, and was too insulting to wait on any King or Queen, who became a wild blond-haired celebrity of the boulevard gutter theatricals, a lover of men and women, a laughing happy-go-lucky blindly ambitious self-loving genius of sorts, this Lestat, this blue-eyed and infinitely confident Lestat, was orphaned on the very night of his creation by the ancient monster who made him, bequeathed to him a fortune in a secret room in a crumbling medieval tower, and then went into the eternal comfort of the ever devouring flames.

This Lestat, knowing nothing of Old Covens and Old Ways, of soot covered gangsters who thrived under cemeteries and believed they had a right to brand him a heretic, a maverick and a bastard of the Dark Blood, went strutting about fashionable Paris, isolated and tormented by his supernatural endowments yet glorying in his new powers, dancing at the Tuileries with the most magnificently clad women, reveling in the joys of the ballet and the high court theater and roaming not only in the Places of Light, as we called them, but meandering mournfully in Notre Dame de Paris itself, right before the High Altar, without the lightning of God striking him where he stood.

Armand’s description of Lestat from The Vampire Armand”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“[...] quite suddenly there came over me another presentiment, that all I loved would endure for a very brief time.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“Yet all pleasure to me was suspect. I was dazzled when I could not give in, and overcome when I did surrender,”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“Love we need, and love can make us forget and forgive the savagery, as perhaps nothing else can.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“It was you who said that a new illumination, one of reason and ethics and genuine compassion, had come again, after dark centuries of bloody religion, to give forth not only its light but its warmth.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“It was you, Master, who let me see what little I could of the marvelous bright world unfolding around me in ways I couldn’t have imagined in the land or time in which I was born.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“Her narrow oval face was so like his and yet so not. He had never been so divorced from feeling, never so abstract in his anger as she was now.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“All the awakened flesh sang with thirst or cursed me with it. It was as if a thousand crushed and muted cells were now chanting for blood.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“Far away in another realm where pianos ought to be played and little boys should dance, they stood, the two like painted cutout figures against the swimming light of the room, merely gazing at me, he the little desert rogue with his fancy black cigarette, puffing away and smacking his lips and raising his eyebrows, and she merely floating it seemed, resolute and thoughtful as before, unshocked, untouched perhaps.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“Her lean face, with its well-shaped pale lips, broke into the freshest and most robust smile, as if neglect and pain had never gnawed at her.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“It was the first time I’d heard her voice, and I saw the deliberate brave calm of her blanched face, the wind making her eyes tear, though she herself remained staunch.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“We’ll get you out, don’t cry, you’re ours now. We have you.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“Give me the boy I was, give me the finest green satin and ruff upon ruff of fancy lace, give me stockings and braided boots, and let my hair be clean and shining.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“There were hours when only the city talked to me, the great clattering, rattling, rustling city of New York, with its traffic forever clanking, even in the thickest snow, with its layers upon layers of voices and lives rising up to the plateau on which I lay, and then beyond it, vastly beyond it in towers such as the world before this time has never beheld.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“How can human hands make this enchantment, how can they pound out of these ivory keys this deluge, this thrashing beauty?”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“On and one went the sprightly melody, eloquent, celebratory, and utterly human, demanding to be felt as well as heard, demanding to be followed in every intricate twist and turn.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“All the world was gone in curls of weightless sound and light.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“Oh, how is it such a fantasy could get its hook so deep?”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“I could scarcely keep myself from laying hands on him, from forcing him to my will, never mind his legendary strength, his gruesome temper. I’d lay hold of him and make him submit.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“Lestat, let me drink. Let me look for the blood with my tongue and my hear. Let me drink, please; you can’t deny me that one moment of intimacy.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“It does not take a scholar, David, to know such saints were made by other saints in centuries to come as actors and actresses chosen for a Passion Play in a country village.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“Why did we wander for so many years together, drifting like elegant phantoms in our lace and velvet cerements into the garish electric lights and electronic noise of the modern age?”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“Time eventually destroyed our love for one another. Time withered our gentle intimacy. Time devoured whatever conversations or pleasures we once agreeably shared.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“I was too pale of soul, too numbed, to used to seeing all things as figments in a series of unconnected dreams.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“Child,” he whispered. “Would I suffer such horrors if not for God?”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“Now you, brave one, little Ganymede of the blasphemers, you willful brazen cherub.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

“I went soft. I saw the shocks of the blows as so many colors, and I thought to myself bitterly, ah, what beautiful colors, yes, colors. Then came the increased wails of my brothers. They too must suffer this, and what mental refuge did they have, these fragile young students, each so well loved and so well taught and groomed for the great world, to find themselves now at the mercy of these demons whose purpose was unknown to me, whose purpose lay beyond anything I could conceive.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand