"Art accomplishes the creation of something orderly & meaningful out of the raw materials of an essentially random world. It is the human ability to make a small version of an ordered universe. Good art makes us see everything more clearly. It heightens, delights and sends us home from the world with knowledge we didn't have before." --Anne Rice
"In the Cathedrals and museums of Italy, blazened on the walls of the cathedral at Sienna, in the niches of St. John Lateran, I saw the magik and the glory that is also embodied in the concept of vampires, ghosts, witches, magi, discarnate and lost souls--the haunt who seeks salvation and is the metaphor for us all--I saw THE SPIRITUAL which can totally inform the suspenseful and tight 'horror novel.'" --Anne Rice
"I'm the vampire Lestat. Remember me?
The vampire who became a super rock star, the one who wrote the autobiography? The one with the blond hair and the grey, and the insatiable desire for visibility and fame? You remember..."--Lestat
"...And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would die tomorrow or the day after or eventually... it doesn't matter. Because if God does not exist, then life... every second of it... Is all we have." --Louis (My favorite quote out of all the chronicle books.)
"We would make our heroes shallow," "We would make them brittle. It is they who must remind of us the true meaning of strength." --Raglan James
"Finally those you love are simply... those you love." --Lestat
"Did I love her?" "Is that what you want to know? Yes, I loved her." --Lestat to Gabrielle about Akasha
"I wish I understood you.."-- Marius to Lestat.
"Maybe I'll obey the rules. Some of them, anyway. What are you going to do if I don't by the way, and haven't I asked you this before?" --Lestat to Marius
"You are the damnedest creature! You make me think of the old story about Alexander the Great. He wept when there were no more worlds to conquer. Will you weep when there are no more rules to break?" --Marius to Lestat
"Ah, but ther are always rules to brake." --Lestat
"You are an imp, Lestat, you know it? A brat." --Marius
"Horror and Moral terror can never be exonerated. They have no real value. Pure evil has no real place." --Lestat
"What are we doing here?"--Louis to Lestat
"Adventure, I told you."--Lestat
"I'm hungry. Get out of my way or I'll kill you." --Lestat to David
"You're a perfect devil, Lestat!" "That's what you are! You are the devil himself!" --Louis to Lestat
"Yes, I know," "And I love to hear you say it, Louis. I need to hear you say it. I don't think anyone will ever say it quite like you do. Come on, say it again. I'm a perfect devil. Tell me how bad I am. It makes me feel so good!" --Lestat to Louis
"You burnt my little house, didn't you?"--Louis to Lestat
"Can you blame me?" "Besides, I was human when I did that. It was human weakness. Want to come and live with me?" --Lestat to Louis
"This means you've forgiven me?"--Louis to Lestat
"No, it means I'm playing with you. I may even destroy you for what you did to me. I haven't made up my mind. Aren't you afraid?" --Lestat to Louis
"No..." --Louis to Lestat
On Claudia: "Claudia was mystery. It was not possible to know what she knew or did not know. And to watch her kill was chilling."
"I have no human nature" --Claudia
"By day I sleep in the sand. By night I am on the wing as if I could truly fly. I need no name. I leave no footprints... I will be a goddess to those I slay." --Gabrielle
On Louis: "A laser beam. Deadly and delicate he seemed. His victims had always loved him."
On Maharet: "Like ice and fire, Maharet had seemed that night. Immensely strong, yet irrepressibly warm. A thin, yet statuesque figure with a tiny waist and flowing skirts, she had the high-toned mystery of fashion mannikins, the eerie glamour of women who have made themselves sculpture."
On Akasha: "The Queen of Heaven she'd seemed, as she had once so loved to be known, presiding over centuries of litany. Her eyes had been shining and empty in the electric light; her mouth soft, guileless."
On Armand: "...some silent answer, some flash of heaven in the very pit of hell in his innocent expression, as if the devil still retained the face and form of the angel after the fall."
"I'm Gentleman Death in silk and lace, come to put out the candles. The canker in the rose." --Lestat
"I can't help being a gorgeous fiend. It's just the card I drew." --Lestat
I want the world to be better. Better for men and women. Better. Only one thing is clear: the old blood drinkers have by now died out, and there is nothing you or I, or the Queen and the King can do to interfere in the flow of human events. I believe men and women must try harder. I try to understand evil ever more deeply with any victim I take.
Any religion that makes fanatical claims and demands on the basis of a god's will frightens me. --Marius to Pandora
"We shall never again let such superstition surround us and the mystery of our powers. We are not infallible. We have no commission from God. We wander the Earth like the giant felines of the great jun-gles, and have no more claim upon those we kill than any creature that seeks to live.
But it is an infallible principle that the slaying of the innocent will drive you mad. Believe me when I tell you that for your peace of mind you must feed on the evil, you must learn to love them in all their hith and degeneracy, and you must thrive on the visions of their evil that will inevitably fill your heart and soul during the kill.
Kill the innocent and you will sooner or later come to guilt, and with it you will come to impotence and finally despair. You may think you are too ruthless and too cold for such. You may feel superior to human beings and excuse your predatory excesses on the ground that you do but seek the necessary blood for your own life. But it won't work in the long run.
In the long run, you will come to know that you are more human than monster, all that is noble in you derives from your humanity, and your enhanced nature can only lead you to value humans all the more. You'll come to pity those you slay, even the most unredeemable, and you will come to love humans so desperately that there will be nights when hunger will seem far preferable to you than the blood repast. --Marius to Armand
But maybe something more wonderful will take place: the world will truly move forward, past all gods and goddess, past all devils and angels. And in such a world, Lestat, we will have less of a place than we have ever had.
All the stories I have told you are finally as useless as an ancient knowledge is to man and to us. Its images and its poetry can be beautiful; it can make us shiver with the recoginition of things we have always suspected or felt. It can draw us back to times when the earth was new to man, and wondrous. But always we come back to the way the earth is now. And in this world the vampire is only a Dark God. He is a Child of Darkness. He can't be anything else. And if he wields any lovely power upon the minds of men, it is only because the human imagination is a secret place of primitive memories and unconfessed desires. The mind of each man is a Savage Garden, to use your phrase, in which all manner of creatures rise and fall, and anthems are sung and things imagined that piust finally be condemned and disavowed.
Yet men love us when they come to know us. They love us even now. The Paris crowds love what they see on the stage of the Theatre of the Vampires. And those who have seen your like walking through the ballrooms of the world, the pale and deadly lord in the velvet cloak, have worshipped in their own way at your feet.
They thrill at the possibility of immortality, at the possibility that a grand and beautiful being could be utterly evil, that he could feel and know all things yet choose willfully to feed his dark appetite. Maybe they wish they could be chat lusciously evil creature. How simple it all seems. And it is the simplicity of it that they want.
But give them the Dark Gift and only one in a multitude will not be as miserable as you are.
What can I say finally that will not confirm your worst fears? I have lived over eighteen hundred years, and I tell you life does not need us. I have never had a true purpose. We have no place. --Marius to Lestat
Men and women are learning animals. If you do not see what they have learned, you're blind. They are creatures ever changing, ever improving, ever expanding their vision and the capacity of their hearts. You are not fair to them when you speak of this as the most bloody century; you are not seeing the light that shines ever more radiantly on account of the darkness; you are not. seeing the evolution of the human soul!…
…True, what you say about war. Yes, and the cries of the dying, I too have heard them; we have all heard them, through all the decades; and even now, the world is shocked by daily reports of armed conflict. But it is the outcry against these horrors which is the light I speak of; it's the attitudes which were never possible in the past. It is the intolerance of thinking men and women in power who for the first time in the history of the human race truly want to put an end to injustice in all forms. --Marius to Akasha
