104
" But Paris, Paris was a universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets—as vast and indestructible as nature itself. All was embraced by her, by her volatile and enchanted populace thronging the galleries, the theaters, the cafes, giving birth over and over to genius and sanctity, philosophy and war, frivolity and the finest art; so it seemed that if all the world outside her were to sink into darkness, what was fine, what was beautiful, what was essential might there still come to its finest flower. Even the majestic trees that graced and sheltered her streets were attuned to her—and the waters of the Seine, contained and beautiful as they wound through her heart; so that the earth on that spot, so shaped by blood and consciousness, had ceased to be the earth and had become Paris. "
― Anne Rice , Interview with the Vampire (The Vampire Chronicles, #1)
106
" New Orleans, though beautiful and desperately alive, was desperately fragile. There was something forever savage and primitive there. Something that threatened the exotic and sophisticated life both from within and without. Not an inch of those wooden streets nor a brick of the crowded Spanish houses had not been bought from the fierce wilderness that forever surrounded the city, ready to engulf it. Hurricanes, floods, fevers, the plague, and the damp of the Louisiana climate itself worked tirelessly on every hewn plank or stone facade, so that New Orleans seemed at all times like a dream in the imagination of her striving populace, a dream held intact at every second by a tenacious though unconscious collective will. "
― Anne Rice , Interview with the Vampire (The Vampire Chronicles, #1)
110
" 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 (The Vampire Chronicles, #1)