I never lie,” I said offhand. “At least not to those I don’t love.
Oh to have you with me, to have you here, not to be alone, but to be with you, my beauty, you of all souls! You.
It was as if when I looked into his eyes I was standing alone on the edge of the world…on a windswept ocean beach. There was nothing but the soft roar of the waves.
The world changes, we do not, therein lies the irony that kills us.
People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil… Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.
How could anyone love Him? What did you just tell me yourself about the world? Don’t you see, everybody hates God now. It’s not that God is dead in the twentieth century. It’s that everybody hates Him! At least I think so.
I saw my real gods . . the gods of most men. Food, drink, and security in conformity.
The Maker offers us creation itself as proof of his greatness.
Would that death were like this. Would that one would sleep and sleep and sleep forever.
And books, they offer one hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.
Oh Lestat, you deserved everything that’s ever happened to you. You better not die. You might actually go to hell.
The spirit who inhabits her animates us all. Destroy the host, you destroy the power. The young die first; the old wither slowly; the eldest perhaps would go last. But she is the Queen of the Damned, and the Damned can’t live without her.
I was just walking around saying “We’re all gonna die!” I never got over it. I went to class, I did what I had to do, but I was a gibbering idiot. It never went away. I never again felt the same way about life and death.
First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.
The atheism and nihilism of my earlier years now seems shallow, and even a bit cocky.
Maybe a new religion will rise now. Maybe without it, man will crumble in cynicism and selfishness because he really needs his gods.
We all suffer under a curse, the curse that we know more than we can endure, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing we can do about the force and the lure of this knowledge.
I congratulate myself on not having arrived into the world until the present time. This age suits my taste.
…what was the good of being a movie werewolf? You howled at the moon; you couldn’t remember what you did, and then somebody shot you.
We have such a terrible, terrible misconception of science. We think it involves the definite, the precise, the known; it is a horrid series of gates to an unknown as vast as the universe; which means endless.
What is written beneath this heavy handsome book cover will count, so sayeth this cover…
….it was a brave man’s fear. I knew what he meant. What must a brave general feel when he knows the battle has gone against him and nothing remains but death?
What is fear after all? It is indecision. You seek some way to resist, escape. There is none.
All my life,I’ve been afraid of things, as a child and a woman must be. I lied about it naturally. I fancied myself a witch and walked in dark streets to punish myself for my doubts. But I knew what it meant to be afraid.
when we are weary, we speak lovingly of dreams as if they embodied our true deisres-What we WOULD have when that which we DO have so sorely disappoints us
I’ll write about my past but I won’t talk about it. I’ll turn it into art if I can, but I won’t talk about it.
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.
It seems an insult to the night to speak of purpose and intent, when this common moment is so brimming full of blessed design tranquility. All things follow their course.
If you really want peace in any world you have to learn to say nothing.
The music as always had a dark sweet luster, but it was more than ever like an endless beginning-a theme ever building to a climax which would never come.
I’ve lived all these years among those who create nothing and change nothing,’ I said. ‘Actors and musicians-they’re saints to me.
It was as if this night were only one of thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into 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.
It has its dark splendor, to walk the nightmare terrain forever.
To die or not to die, that is the question; it is nobler to live in torment and rage than not to live at all?
Resignation requires will, and will requires decision, and decision requires belief, and belief requires that there is something to believe in!
First time my master’s in English literature ever proved useful.
How pathetic it is to describe these things which can’t truly be described.
And he would listen, making only a few comments, always sympathetic, so that when I left him I had the distinct impression he had solved everything for me.
What if the drive to survive was a form of faith, a form of prayer?
But Marchent, most journalists can’t be trusted. You do know that, don’t you?
Sadness, it was such an arresting emotion. You could almost convince yourself of the rhyme and reason of heartbreak.
Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.
Without memory there can be no insight. Without love, there can be no appreciation.
Actors and actresses make magic,’ I said. ‘They make things happen on the stage; they invent; they create.
A singer can shatter glass with the proper high note,” he said, “but the simplest way to break glass is simply to drop it on the floor.
You’re a mystery the way a sacrament is a mystery.
Darkness had been essentially banished from the Earth. It had become a choice.
I tell you, Richard, if you ever get ready to sell your soul, don’t bother to sell it to another human being. It’s bad business to even consider such a thing.
Writers had a way of redeeming everything that ever happens to them.
A perfectly evil Devil makes even less sense than a perfect God.
Evil is anything that goes against life, harms life, stifles life, destroys life. Evil is bringing harm to another person, inflicting unnecessary pain, suffering, or confusion. All evil comes from this. This is the root of all evil.
If goodness does exist, then I’m the opposite of it. I’m evil, and I revel in it
God kills indiscriminately and so shall we. For no creatures under God are as we are none so like him as ourselves.
Is there any one of us who doesn’t want to strike back at all the evil in this world?
I would die rather than live without you. I would die the same way he died. I can’t bear you to look at me the way you did. I cannot bear it if you do not love me!” -Claudia.
Amazing what the British do with language; the nuances of politeness. The world’s great diplomats, surely.
Finally those you love are simply … those you love.
Because people don’t believe it unless it happens to them.
What mysteries we are, human, vampire, monster, mortal, that we can love and hate simultaneously, and that emotions of all sorts might not parade for what they are not.
To be human, that’s what most of us long for. It is the human which has become myth to us.
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.
And you are with us and one of us, and we are the people of the moon and the stars.
New Orleans, city of roaches, city of decay, city of our family, and of happy, happy people.
I had to have him, had to. Just the way I had to have everything I wanted; or had to do everything I’d ever wanted to do.
Because,” she said, “that is what men would call it. They invented Satan, didn’t they? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which men want to live.
Ah, what broken creatures we are, and how we endure.
Heaven would be Hell in no time if every cruel, selfish, vicious soul went to Heaven.
Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.
In the story of the prince and the frog, there’s always a frog. This story … it has no frog.
You, know, the only thing I can be is a writer. I’m absolutely unprepared for anything else. When you’ve lived the kind of life I have, you are good for nothing. Only writing can save you.
You see that old woman? That will never happen to you. You will never grow old, and you will never die.And it means something else too, doesn’t it? I shall never ever grow up.
I was still sitting there, too unsure of myself to say anything, when Nicolas kissed me.’Let’s go to bed,’ he said softly.
Goddamn it, do it yourself. You’re five hundred years old and you can’t use a telephone? Read the directions. What are you, an immortal idiot?
I can’t help being a gorgeous fiend. It’s just the card I drew.
We are the things that others fear,” I said. “Remember that.
I watched him rise from the coffin, with slow, elegant gestures; our gestures, for we are the only beings who routinely rise from coffins.
After all, these were blood drinkers, beings who spoke gently, liked poetry, and yet killed mortals all the time.
Alas, my being the James Bond of vampires isn’t the whole issue. Vanity must wait.
In his refusal to believe in anything supernatural or inherently evil, he was as unrealistic as an old voodoo queen who sees spirits everywhere.
Lestat: Toughen up baby. I’m looking for the eternal scum.
I touched the small sacred images. I shook my head and bit my lip, as if to say, How awful that he should have stolen these! But I also found it very funny. And further proof that God had no power over me.
And I realized that I’d tolerated him this long because of self-doubt.
One moment the world is as it is. The next, it is something entirely different. Something it has never been before.
Then, are you master of us all? You didn’t teach her that. Was she supposed to imbibe it from my quiet subservience?
Consequently, if you believe God made Satan, you must realize that all Satan’s power comes from God and so that Satan is simply God’s child, and that we are God’s children also. There are no children of Satan, really.
I never knew what life was until it ran out in a red gush over any lips, my hands!
I am the Vampire Lestat. I’m immortal more or less. The light of the sun, the sustained heat of an intense fire-these things might destroy me. But then again, they might not.
Should we put out the light? And then put out the light. But once put out thy light, I cannot give it vital breath again. It needs must wither.
I think we are wise, we English speakers, to savor accents. They teach us things about our own tongue.
Good was above all kind; it was to be gentle. It was to waste nothing. It was to paint, to read, to study, to listen.
Life is a tragedy, one way or another. What is certain is that you die.
But remember the overall lesson, that your love for others, and their love for you, that the increase of love in life itself around you, is what matters.
For what can the damned really have to say to the damned?
I was feeling fear. Not a wild, mortal fear, but something cold like a hook in my side.
Ah, come now. I look like an angel, but I’m not. The old rules of nature encompass many creatures like me. We’re beautiful like the diamond-backed snake, or the striped tiger, yet we’re merciless killers
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.
It seemed at moments, when I sat alone in the dark stateroom, that the sky had come down the meet the sea and some great secret was to be revealed.
Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort.
It was as if this night were only one of thousands of 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.
I was a newborn vampire, weeping at the beauty of the night.
It struck me, sharp and hard, that I had been given so many chances to save my soul that my entire life had been constructed around these chances! That was my nature – going from temptation to temptation, not to sin, but to be redeemed.
You’re the hunter, the warrior. You’re stronger than anyone else here, that’s your tragedy.
as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.
Love me. You have destroyed everything! But if you love me, it can all be restored in a new form. Love me.
The greatest create of power you have on earth, whether you are an angel, a spirit, a man or woman or child is to help others.
I’d like to meet the devil some night,’ he said once with a malignant smile. ‘I’d chase him from here to the wilds of the Pacific. I am the devil.
You think he has no will of his own? You are a fool,Charlotte. Lie with him instead of me!’ I laughed at her, and seeing the pain in her eyes, I laughed more.‘I should like to see it, you and your daimon. Lie there and call him to come now.
There are many worlds in the ‘Realm of Worlds’ where the ascendant beings are not male or female.
She had understood before she had ever dreamed of a city such as this, where every texture, every color, leapt out at you, where every fragrance was a drug, and the air itself was something alive and breathing.
Lasher,’ she said, ‘for the wind which you send that lashes the grasslands, for the wind that lashes the leaves from the trees.
Why does shame and self-loathing become cruelty to the innocent ?
No one is safe from nature’s savagery,not even the innocent. Only beauty is consistent. Gabrielle envisions a time when the Savage Garden will overtake civilizations and destroy it.
Come on, say it again. I’m a perfect devil. Tell me how bad I am. It makes me feel so good!
What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it’s that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness ofnormality that is just a myth.
Maybe I’ll obey the rules. Some of them, anyway, who knows? What are you going to do if I don’t, by the way, and haven’t I asked you this before?
As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that.
All the mortal world is a lethal enemy during those hours between dawn and dusk.
I don’t think you can hold in your mind the full conception of what the world is.
The truth is laughter always sounds more perfect than weeping. Laughter flows in a violent riff and is effortlessly melodic. Weeping is often fought choked half strangled or surrendered to with humiliation.
It was as if I had only just been able to see colours and shapes for the first time. I was so enthralled with the buttons on Lestat’s black coat that I looked at nothing else for a long time.
I claim Dickens as a mentor. He’s my teacher. He’s one of my driving forces.
People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don’t know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.
I want to love all the children of God – Christian, Jew, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist – everyone. I want to love gay Christians and straight Christians.
Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ASK. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds.
When you make his sandwiches, put a sexy or loving note in his lunch box.
Writers, as they gain success, feel like outsiders because writers don’t come together in real groups.
Stephen King in many respects is a wonderful writer. He has made a contribution. People in the future will be able to pick up Stephen King’s books and learn a lot about who we were by reading those books.