Anne Rice
American novelist, known as the author of the Vampire Chronicles.
Tell me how bad I am... it makes me feel so good. [Last line]
"Give me a man or woman who has read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a dangerous enemy indeed."
But reason was only a created thing, imposed with faith upon the world, and the stars promise nothing to no one.
To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.
The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass.
"We would make our heroes shallow,” he answered, the words very slow and almost sad. “We would make them brittle. It is they who must remind us of the true meaning of strength."
Doesn't matter now, devils who paint angels.
But let me be a lover in the Savage Garden with you, and the light that went out of life would come back in a great burst of glory. Out of mortal flesh I would pass into eternity. I would be one of you.
I was seven years old. What do you know when you’re seven years old? All my life, or so I thought, we’d been in the city of Alexandria, in the Street of the Carpenters, with the other Galileans, and sooner or later we were going home.
"And when a strong man is sweet, even Goddesses look down from Mount Olympus."
Evil is a point of view. God kills indiscriminately and so shall we. For no creatures under God are as we are, none so like him as ourselves.
I want to know, for example, why beauty exists," she [Gabrielle] said, "why nature continues to contrive it, and what is the link between the life of a lightning storm with the feelings these things inspire in us? If God does not exist, if these things are not unified into one metaphorical system, then why do they retain for us such symbolic power? Lestat calls it the Savage Garden, but for me that is not enough.
"Oh my precocious one," she said. "You never fail to charm me. Bisexual is it, how Byronic and charming. Doesn't that double's one's chances for love? I'm so delighted."
You do have a story inside you; it lies articulate and waiting to be written — behind your silence and your suffering.
For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being "Christian" or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to "belong" to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else. … In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.
Your quest is for darkness only. This sea is not your sea. The myths of men are not your myths. Men’s treasures are not yours.
Vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires ... How avant-garde!
Centuries ago, when I first stood on that little boulevard stage in Paris — when I saw the happy faces, when I heard applause — I felt as if my body and soul had found their destiny; I felt as if every promise in my birth and childhood had begun its fulfillment at last.
Oh, there were other actors, worse and better; other singers; other clowns; there have been a million since and a million will come after this moment. But each of us shines with his own inimitable power; each of us comes alive in his own unique and dazzling moment; each of us has his chance to vanquish the others forever in the eye of the beholder, and that is the only kind of accomplishment I can really understand: the kind of accomplishment in which the self-this self, if you will — is utterly whole and triumphant.
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.
"I saw it," said James. "I saw it when he made the sparrows out of clay on the Sabbath. The teacher told him he shouldn’t do such things on the Sabbath. Jesus looked at the birds and they turned into real birds. They flew away. You saw it too. He killed Eleazer, Mother, I saw it."