Interview with the Vampire Quotes

“ ‘Exactly, and consequently if you believe God made Satan, you must realize that all Satan’s power comes from God and that Satan is simply God’s child, and that we are God’s children also. There are no children of Satan, really.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I drank, sucking the blood out of the holes, experiencing for the first time since infancy the special pleasure of sucking nourishment, the body focused with the mind upon one vital source.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Being a vampire for him meant revenge. Revenge against life itself. Every time he took a life it was revenge. It was no wonder, then, that he appreciated nothing. The nuances of vampire existence weren't even available to him because he was focused with a maniacal vengeance upon the mortal life he'd left. Consumed with hatred, he looked back. Consumed with envy, nothing pleased him unless he could take it from others; and once having it, he grew cold and dissatisfied, not loving the thing for itself; and so he went after something else. Vengeance, blind and sterile and contemptible.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I was feeling fear. Not a wild, mortal fear, but something cold like a hook in my side.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“And cruelly, surely, I said to her, "Did you love this child?" I will never forget her face then, the violence in her, the absolute hatred. "Yes." She reached for the locket even as I clutched it. It was guilt that was consuming her, not love. It was guilt -that shop of dolls Claudia had described to me, shelves and shelves of the effigy of that dead child. But guilt that absolutely understood the finality of death. There was something as hard in her as the evil in myself, something as powerful. She touched my waistcoat and opened her fingers there, pressing them against my chest. And I was on my knees, drawing closer to her, her hair brushing my face.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Evil is a point of view”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness;”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I miss the flowers; more than anything else I miss the flowers,’ she mused. And sought after them even in the paintings which we brought from the shops and the galleries, magnificent canvases such as I'd never seen in New Orleans-from the classically executed lifelike bouquets, tempting you to reach for the petals that fell on a three-dimensional tablecloth, to a new and disturbing style in which the colors seemed to blaze with such intensity they destroyed the old lines, the old solidity, to make a vision like to those states when I'm nearest my delirium and flowers grow before my eyes and crackle like the flames of lamps. Paris flowed into these rooms.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Your evil is that you cannot be evil. And I shall suffer for it no longer!”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“And I had the most disconcerting sensation: that in my memory she would look up from that game of solitaire and the sockets of her eyes would be empty.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Can you picture it, this splendid domesticity, dim lamps, the vampire father singing to the vampire daughter? Only the doll had a human face, only the doll.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“But you must have all the things you never had of life and make of immortality a junk shop in which both of us become grotesque.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“there was no time in Lestat's plan for anything but his plan.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I lived like a man who wanted to die but who had no
courage to do it himself. I walked black streets and alleys alone; I
passed out in cabarets. I backed out of two duels more from apathy
than cowardice and truly wished to be murdered. And then I was
attacked. It might have been anyone-and my invitation was open to
sailors, thieves, maniacs, anyone. But it was a vampire. He caught me
lust a few steps from my door one night and left me for dead, or so I
thought.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I wish I could," laughed the vampire. "How positively delightful. I should like to pass through all manner of different keyholes and feel the tickle of their peculiar shapes. No." He shook his head. "That is, how would you say today . . . bullshit?”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Louis!’ he said. ‘You are in love with your mortal nature! You chase after the phantoms of your former self.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Listen, keep your eyes wide,’ Lestat whispered to me, his lips moving against my neck. I remember that the movement of his lips raised the hair all over my body, sent a shock of sensation through my body that was not unlike the pleasure of passion.…”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I wanted to forget him, and yet it seemed I thought of him always. It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I'd envision his face -- not as it had been the last night in the fire, but on the other nights, that last evening he spent with us at home, his hand playing idly with the keys of the spinet, his head tilted to one side. A sickness rose in me more wretched than anguish when I saw what my dreams were doing. I wanted him alive! In the dark nights of eastern Europe, Lestat was the only vampire I'd found.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Her sobs grew worse, more bitter, until finally I bent and kissed her soft neck and cheeks. Winter plums. Plums from an enchanted wood where the fruit never falls from the boughs. Where the flowers never wither and die.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I saw my life as if I stood apart from it, the vanity, the self-serving, the constant fleeing from one petty annoyance after another, the lip service to God and the Virgin and a host of saints whose names filled my prayer books, none of whom made the slightest difference in a narrow, materialistic, and selfish existence. I saw my real gods...the gods of most men. Food, drink, and security in conformity.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“(…) death had come to dinner in their small house near the ramparts and stayed to say grace when everyone was done.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I think you're like a man who loses an arm or a leg and keeps insisting that he can feel pain where the arm or leg used to be.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Remarkable, if for nothing else, because of this, that all of those men and women who stayed for any reason left behind them some monument, some structure of marble and brick and stone that still stands; so that even when the gas lamps went out and the planes came in and the office buildings crowded the blocks of Canal Street, something irreducible of beauty and romance remained; not in every street perhaps, but in so many that the landscape is for me the landscape of those times always, and walking now in the starlit streets of the Quarter or the Garden District I am in those times again. I suppose that is the nature of the monument. Be it a small house or a mansion of Corinthian columns and wrought-iron lace. The monument does not say that this or that man walked here. No, that what he felt in one time in one spot continues. The moon that rose over New Orleans then still rises. As long as the monuments stand, it still rises. The feeling, at least here...and there...it remains the same.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“The only power that exists is inside ourselves…”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I closed my eyes and heard the wind and the sound of water flowing softly, swiftly in the river. It was enough, for one moment. And I knew that it would not endure, that it would fly away from me like something torn out of my arms, and I would fly after it, more desperately lonely than any creature under God, to get it back.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“It seemed at momemts, When I sat alone in the dark stateroom, that the sky had come down to meet the sea and some great secert was to be revealed.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I looked up and saw myself in a most palpable vision ascending the altar steps, opening the tiny sacrosanct tabernacle, reaching with monstrous hands for the consecrated ciborium, and taking the Body of Christ and strewing Its white wafers all over the carpet; and walking then on the sacred wafers, walking up and down before the altar, giving Holy Communion to the dust. I rose up now in the pew and stood there staring at this vision. I knew full well the meaning of it. “God did not live in this church; these statues gave an image to nothingness, I was the supernatural in this cathedral. I was the only supermortal thing that stood conscious under this roof!”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“You know nothing,' she said to him gravely, her voice so low that
the slightest noise from the street interrupted it, might carry her words
away, so that I found myself straining to hear her against myself as I
lay with my head back against the chair. `And suppose the vampire
who made you knew nothing, and the vampire who made that
vampire knew nothing, and the vampire before him knew nothing,
and so it goes back and back, nothing proceeding from nothing, until
there is nothing! And we must live with the knowledge that there is no
knowledge.'
`Yes!' he cried out suddenly, his hands out, his voice tinged with
something other than anger.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I looked at Armand , at his large brown eyes in that taut, timeless face, watching me again like a painting; and I felt the slow shifting of the physical world I'd felt in the painted ballroom, the pull of my old delirium, the wakening of a need so terrible that the very promise of its fulfillment contained the unbearable possibility of disappointment. And yet there was the question, the awful, ancient, hounding question of evil.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Did you think I'd be your daughter forever? Are you the father of fools, the fool of fathers?'

'Your tone is unkind with me,' I answered.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire