Interview with the Vampire Quotes

“God kills, and so shall we;”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“And with that same sensibility that you cherish you will see death in all its beauty, life as it is only known on the very point of death. Don’t you understand that, Louis? You alone of all creatures can see death that way with impunity. You … alone … under the rising moon … can strike like the hand of God!”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“It was only when I became a vampire that I respected for the first time all of life. I never saw a living, pulsing human being until I was a vampire; I never knew what life was until it ran out in a red gush over my lips, my hands!”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I am to live to the end of the world, and I do not even know what I am!”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“He led me quickly through the street, turning every time I hesitated, his hand out for mine, a smile on his lips, his presence as marvellous to me as the night he'd come in my mortal life and told me we would be vampires.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“No. 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. Vengence, blind and sterile and contemptible.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“As if the night had said to me, ‘You are the night and the night alone understands you and enfolds you in its arms.’ One with the shadows. Without nightmare. An inexplicable peace.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“What had I expected? What right had I to be so bitterly disappointed in Lestat that I would let him die! Because he wouldn’t show me what I must find in myself?”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Did you kill this vampire who made you? Is that why you are here without him, why you won’t say his name? Santiago thinks that you did.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“And all this time I was educating Claudia, whispering in her tiny seashell ear that our eternal life was useless to us if we did not see the beauty around us, the creation of mortals everywhere…”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“p.502
Tu es aussi froid et distant que ces étranges tableaux modernes faits de lignes et de formes rigides que je ne parviens ni à aimer, ni à comprendre.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“P.434
Ils reflètent le cynisme de ce temps. Ils représentent ceux qui ne peuvent comprendre que nous avons atteint la fin des possibilités. Ils étalent une complaisance complexe et idiote à parodier le miraculeux, vivent une décadence dont l'ultime réfuge est l'autodérision et l'impuissance manierée.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“J'ai levé les mains sur le point d'éclater d'un rire amer et hystérique. « Ne vois-tu pas ? Je ne suis l'esprit d'aucune époque. Je suis en rupture avec tout. Je l'ai toujours été. Je n'ai jamais été à ma place où que ce soit, qu'importe l'époque.

- Mais Louis, a-t-il dit, c'est là tout l'esprit de ton époque. Tu ne le vois pas ? Tout le monde est si récent la même chose que toi. Ta perte de foi, ta chute dans le mal, voilà l'âme de ce siècle. »”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“p.310
Mais Paris était un univers à part entière qui se suffisait à lui-même. Taillée et façonnée par l'histoire, c'est ainsi qu'elle apparaissait à cette époque, sous la règne de Napoléon III, avec ses bâtiments imposants, ses cathédrales immenses, ses grands boulevards et ses sinueuses rues médiévales, aussi vastes et indestructibles que la nature. Elle englobait tout avec sa population versatile et exaltée, qui affluait dans les musées, les théâtres, les cafés, donnant sans cesse naissance au génie et à la santé, à la philosophie et à la guerre, à la frivolité et aux arts les plus raffinés. De sorte qu'on aurait dit que, si le monde extérieur sombrait dans les ténèbres, alors tout ce qu'il y avait de distingué, de beau et d'essentiel s'y serait parfaitement épanoui malgré tout. Même les arbres majestueux qui habillaient et arbitraient ces rues s'y développaient en harmonie avec elles, ainsi que les eaux de la Seine qui, magnifiques et soumises, serpentaient jusqu'aux dents de son cœur, tant et si bien qu'en ce lieu la terre, ainsi modelée par le sang et la conscience, avait cessé d'être de la terre pour devenir Paris.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“p.116
L'antagonisme réside dans le rapport entre l'éthique de l'artiste et celle de la société, pas entre l'esthétique et la mortalité.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“P.75 Pour lui, être un vampire était une revanche, une revanche sur la vie elle-même. Chacune de celles qu'il ôtait était la marque de sa vengeance. Pas étonnant, après cela, qu'il n'apprécie rien du tout. Il était incapable de saisir les nuances qui présentaient l'existence d'un vampire parce qu'il était obsédé par un désir maniaque de vengeance sur la vie de mortel à laquelle il avait rénoncé. Consumé d'envie qu'il était, il se satisfaisait uniquement de ce qu'il pouvait ravir aux autres, et une fois qu'il l'avait obtenu, il s'en laissait immédiatement, ne l'appréciant pas pour sa juste valeur, alors il se mettait en quête d'une autre chose à s'accaparer.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I had perceived certain changes in her which made me at once aware she was Lestat’s daughter as well as my own. From me she had learned the value of money, but from Lestat she had inherited a passion for spending it; and she wasn’t to leave without the most”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“It seemed a lamp died somewhere. That from the cool, damp air that much light was suddenly, soundlessly subtracted. I was sitting on the verge of dream. Had I been mortal I would have been content to sleep there. And in that drowsy, comfortable state I had a strange, habitual mortal feeling, that the sun would wake me gently later and I would have that rich, habitual vision of the ferns in the sunshine and the sunshine an the droplets of rain. I indulged that feeling. I half closed my eyes.

Often afterwards I tried to remember those moments. Tried over and over to recall just what it was in those rooms as we rested there, that began to disturb me, should have disturbed me. How, being off my guard, I was somehow insensible to the subtle changes which must have been taking place there. Long after, bruised and robbed and embittered beyond my wildest dreams, I sifted through those moments, those drowsy quiet early-hour moments when the clock ticked almost imperceptibly on the mantelpiece, and the sky grew paler and paler; and all I could remember-despite the desperation with which I lengthened and fixed that time, in which I held out my hands to stop the clock-all I could remember was the soft changing of tight.

On guard, I would never have let it pass. Deluded with larger concerns, I made no note of it. A lamp gone out, a candle extinguished by the shiver of its own hot pool of wax. My eyes half shut, I had the sense then of impending darkness, of being shut up in darkness.

And then I opened my eyes, not thinking of lamps or candles. And it was too late.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“if love would not have loosed on her remaining years a horror worse than grief. I left her with grief. Over and over and over.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Only that relief which weariness at last imposes, when neither mind nor body can endure the terror any longer.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“haven’t”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Babette had died young, insane, restrained finally from wandering towards the ruins of Pointe du Lac, insisting she had seen the devil there and must find him;”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Since the day she’d begun to question him, this—whatever it was to be—was inevitable.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Lestat had a musician friend in the Rue Dumaine. We had seen him at a recital in the home of a Madame LeClair, who lived there also, which was at that time an extremely fashionable street; and this Madame LeClair, with whom Lestat was also occasionally amusing himself, had found the musician a room in another mansion nearby, where Lestat visited him often.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“I wish you would play the music,' I said softly, unobtrusively, but as persuasively as possible. Sometimes this worked with Lestat. If I said something just right he found himself doing what I'd said. And now he did just that: with a little snarl, as if to say, 'You fool,' he began playing the music.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“We’ll find others of our kind,’ she said. ‘We’ll find them in central Europe. That is where they live in such numbers that the stories, both fiction and fact, fill volumes. I’m convinced it was from there that all vampires came, if they came from any place at all.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“There was nothing more to say to her. I set her down. ‘I took your life,’ I said. ‘He gave it back to you.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“You speak of us as if we always existed as we are now,’ she said, her voice soft, measured, the child’s tone rounded with the woman’s seriousness.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“Lestat having a passion for Shakespeare which surprised me,”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

“And so to me, the swelling population was a mercy, a forest in which I was lost, unable to stop myself, whirling too fast for thought or pain, accepting again and again the invitation to death rather than extending it.”
― Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire