Interview with the Vampire Quotes

“I didn’t know I thought these things. I spoke them now as my thoughts. And they were my most profound feelings taking a shape they could never have taken had I not spoken them, had I not thought them out this way in conversation with another. I thought myself then possessed of a passive mind, in a sense. I mean that my mind could only pull itself together, formulate thought out of the muddle of longing and pain, when it was touched by another mind; fertilized by it; deeply excited by that other mind and driven to form conclusions.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I understand you only too well …’ I said. ‘That passivity in me has been the core of it all, the real evil. That weakness, that refusal to compromise a fractured and stupid morality, that awful pride! For that, I let myself become the thing I am, when I knew it was wrong. For that, I let Claudia become the vampire she became, when I knew it was wrong. For that, I stood by and let her kill Lestat, when I knew that was wrong, the very thing that was her undoing. I lifted not a finger to prevent it.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I never laughed at you," he said. "I cannot afford to laugh at you. It is through you that I can save myself from the despair which I've described to you as our death. It is through you that I must make my link with this nineteenth century and come to understand it in a way that will revitalize me, which I so desperately need. It is for you that I've been waiting at the Théâtre des Vampires. If I knew of a mortal of that sensitivity, that pain, that focus, I would make him a vampire in an instant. But such can rarely be done. No, I've had to wait and watch for you. And now I'll fight for you. Do you see how ruthless I am in love? Is that what you meant by love?”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Do you see what I am! Why, if God exists, does He suffer me to exist!’ I said to him. ‘You talk of sacrilege!’ He dug his nails into my hands, trying to free himself, his missal dropping to the floor, his rosary clattering in the folds of his cassock. He might as well have fought the animated statues of the saints. I drew my lips back and showed him my virulent teeth. ‘Why does He suffer me to live!’ I said.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“But the world was a tomb to me, a graveyard of broken statues, and each of those statues resembled her face.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“What would Christ need have done to make me follow Him like Matthew or Peter? Dress well, to begin with, And have a luxurious head of pampered yellow hair.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Had you asked me then, I would have told you it was aesthetic, that I wished to understand death in stages. That the death of an animal yielded such pleasure and experience to me that I had only begun to understand it, and wished to save the experience of human death for my mature understanding. But it was moral. Because all aesthetic decisions are moral, really.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Your fall from grace and faith has been the fall of a century.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I suppose we could people the world with vampires, the three of us,’ she said.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“All I want here is a certain space, a certain peace. Or not to be here at all.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Evil is a point of view. God kills, indiscriminately, and so shall we. He takes the richest and the poorest, as so shall we, for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“ready to fall into my pain again because I deserved it,”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“the shutting of the coffin is always disturbing. It is rather like going under a modern anesthetic on an operating table. Even a casual mistake on the part of an intruder might mean death.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“and when I took my fingers down, there was the stain of the tears, tinged with mortal blood. And already there was begun in me the tingling of the monster that had killed, and would kill again,”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“For what secrets, what truths had those monstrous creatures of night to give us? What, of necessity, must be their terrible limits, if indeed we were to find them at all? What can the damned really say to the damned?”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“My last sunrise,’ said the vampire. ‘That morning, I was not yet a vampire. And I saw my last sunrise.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Your body's dying...pay no attention”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“And through the gloom I saw that mortal boy watching me, and I smelled the hot aroma of his flesh.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“One doesn’t simply glut oneself on blood.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“they had not yet been destroyed as Africans completely. Slavery was the curse of their existence; but they had not been robbed yet of that which had been characteristically theirs. They tolerated the baptism and modest garments imposed on them by the French Catholic laws; but in the evenings, they made their cheap fabrics into alluring costumes, made jewelry of animal bones and bits of discarded metal which they polished to look like gold; and the slave cabins of Pointe du Lac were a foreign country, an African coast after dark, in which not even the coldest overseer would want to wander.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“The trip back from Pointe du Lac was thrilling. And the constant chatter of Lestat was positively the most boring and disheartening thing I experienced. Of course as I said, I was far from being his equal.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Only those few accounts of the vampires of eastern Europe, which had become for her a sort of Bible.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“… he listened in the way that we dream of others listening, his face seeming to reflect on every thing said. He did not start forward to seize on my slightest pause, to assert an understanding of something before the thought was finished, or to argue with a swift, irresistible impulse - the things which often make dialogue impossible.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I came to make peace with you, even if you are the father of lies. You're my father,' she said.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Because all aesthetic decisions are moral, really.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“For you see,' I said to her in that same calm voice, 'what died tonight in this room was not that woman. It will take her many nights to die, perhaps years. What has died in this room tonight is the last vestige in me of what was human.”
― Anne Rice, Interview With The Vampire

“Is this the only question you bring to me, is this the only power that obsesses you, so that you must make us gods and devils yourself when the only power that exists is inside ourselves?”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“nights, world without end, night curving into night to make a great arching line of which I couldn’t see the end, a night in which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“No te enamores tanto de la noche como para perder tu camino.”
― Anne Rice, Entrevista con el vampiro

“Son tu conciencia y tu voluntad las que deben mantenerte vivo.”
― Anne Rice, Entrevista con el vampiro