Home > Work > The Vampire Lestat (The Vampire Chronicles, #2)
141 " And my worst problem was laughter. I would go into fits of laughter and I couldn't stop. Anything could set me off. The sheer madness of my own position might set me off.This can still happen to me fairly easily. No loss, no pain, no deepening understanding of my predicament changes it. Something strikes me as funny. I begin to laugh and I can't stop. "
― Anne Rice , The Vampire Lestat (The Vampire Chronicles, #2)
142 " It was the other war that was going to happen, the one in which we’d all come together, or they would all come to fight me. That was the real reason for The Vampire Lestat. That was the kind of game I was playing. But that other lovely possibility of real revelation and disaster … Well, that added a hell of a lot of spice! "
143 " Oh, not goodness again,” he said. “You and your malady of mortality, and your malady of goodness. "
144 " Somber, yes, but light and beauty come together in you in a thousand different patterns. "
145 " each kiss was the perfect consummation of desire. What can we do but reach for the embrace that must now contain both heaven and hell: our doom again and again and again. "
146 " Don't you see?" I said softly. "It is a new age. It requires a new evil. And I am that new evil." I paused, watching him. "I am the vampire for these times. "
147 " I couldn’t bear delving into his soul without his knowing it. Yet I couldn’t stop myself from sensing a vast secret terrain inside him, grimmer perhaps than I had ever dreamed, and his words came back to me that the darkness in him was like the darkness I’d seen at the inn, and that he tried to conceal it from me. "
148 " And everything I see when I look at you is utterly insubstantial. It is a commingling of tiny movements and indefinable colors as if you haven’t a body at all, but are a collection of heat and light. You are light itself, and what am I now? Eternal as I am, I curl like a cinder in that blaze. "
149 " There was no judgment day, no final explanation, no luminous moment in which all terrible wrongs would be made right, all horrors redeemed. The witches burnt at the stake would never be avenged. No one was ever going to tell us anything! "
150 " She would have been gorgeous if someone had thrown her into a waterfall and held her there for half an hour and I told her so silently. "
151 " Beauty wasn’t the treachery he imagined it to be, rather it was an uncharted land where one could make a thousand fatal errors, a wild and indifferent paradise without signposts of evil or good. "
152 " In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art—the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard’s canvases—beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden. "
153 " Good and evil, those are concepts man has made. And man is better, really, than the Savage Garden. "
154 " The power of Satan will blast you into hell,' the boy bellowed, gathering his remaining strength.'You keep saying that!' I said. 'And it keeps not happening, as we can all see! "
155 " I don’t know how to be bad at being bad. "
156 " He wasn’t a living thing. He was a monster. A vampire was what he was, a blood-sucking corpse from the grave gifted with intellect! "
157 " Better they should run from me than not see me. Better they should know I was something monstrous than for me to glide through the world unrecognized by those upon whom I preyed. "
158 " Treachery it was, the theft of immortality. A dark Prometheus stealing a luminescent fire. Laughter in the darkness. Laughter echoing in the catacomb. Echoing as if down the centuries. "
159 " It’s only mercy I ask, that I go now to find hell, if there is a hell, or sweet oblivion which surely I do not deserve. If there is a Prince of Darkness, then I shall set eyes upon him at last. I shall spit in his face. "
160 " Understand the style of garment that adorns your body, the styles of dwellings in which you spend your leisure hours, the place in which you hunt. Understand what it means to feel the passage of time! Yes, and feel all the pain of seeing things die... Of course. You are made to triumph over time, not to run from it. "