Anne Rice Quotes

“If I am an angel, paint me with black wings.”

“I love you still, that's the torment of it. Lestat I never loved. But you! The measure of my hatred is that love. They are the same! Do you know now how much I hate you!”

“It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words.”

“You do have a story inside you; it lies articulate and waiting to be written — behind your silence and your suffering.”

“There is one purpose to life and one only: to bear witness to and understand as much as possible of the complexity of the world- its beauty, its mysteries, its riddles.”

“I don't like myself you know. I love myself. I'm devoted to myself till my dying day. But I don't like myself.”

“In the very depths of Hell, do not demons love one another?”

“Because I show you my pain, I do not of necessity love you.”

“Merciful death. How you love your precious guilt”

“I have lived lies. I have done it again and again. I live lies because I cannot endure the weakness of anger, and I cannot admit the irrationality of love.-Marius”

“One tiny flame could make so many other flames; one tiny flame could set afire a whole world.”

“The world changes, we do not, therein lies the irony that kills us.”

“So we reach into the raging chaos, and we cling to it, and we tell ourselves it has meaning, and that the world is good, and we are not evil, and we will all go home in the end.”

“One moment the world is as it is. The next, it is something entirely different. Something it has never been before.”

“The supernatural world has always been more real to me than the real world.”

“None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are.”

“The prince is never going to come. Everyone knows that; and maybe sleeping beauty's dead.”

“To write something you have to risk making a fool of yourself.”

“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.”

“Tell me how bad I am… it makes me feel so good.”

“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 never lie," I said offhand. "At least not to those I don't love.”

“I can’t help being a gorgeous fiend. It’s just the card I drew.”

“The only power that exists is inside ourselves.”

“Keep your secrets
Keep your silence
It is a better gift than truth”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Take me from this earth
an endless night-
this, the end of life.
From the dark I feel your lips
and taste your bloody kiss.”

“Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort.”

“Goodnight sweet prince, may flights of devils wing you to your rest.”

“Believe in angels? Then believe in vampires. Believe in me. There are worse things on earth.”

“Strong women are absolutely unpredictable.”

“I'm Gentleman Death in silk and lace, come to put out the candles. The canker in the heart of the rose.”

“Oh Lestat, you deserved everything that's ever happened to you. You better not die. You might actually go to hell.”

“Just remember… life without me would be even more unbearable.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We're frightened of what makes us different.”

“And I realized that I’d tolerated him this long because of self-doubt.”

“Do you know what it means to be loved by Death?… Do you know what it means to have Death know your name?”

“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.”

“How pathetic it is to describe these things which can't truly be described.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Be kind. Always if you have a choice, be kind.”

“In the spring of 1988, I returned to New Orleans, and as soon as I smelled the air, I knew I was home.
It was rich, almost sweet, like the scent of jasmine and roses around our old courtyard.
I walked the streets, savoring that long lost perfume.”

“I was good and bad, but never wicked.”

“How shameful. How predictable! How insipid. And how sweet.”

“Every moment must be first known and then savored.”

“Don't you see? I'm not the spirit of any age. I'm at odds with everything and always have been! I have never belonged anywhere with anyone at any time!”

“Drink from me and live forever.
Lestat de Lioncourt”

“I was a newborn vampire, weeping at the beauty of the night.”

“We breathe the light, we breathe the music, we breathe the moment as it passes through us.”

“To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.”

“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.”

“I know nothing of god or the devil. I have never learned a secret nor found a cure that would damn or save my soul.”

“As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that.”

“I live lies because I cannot endure the weakness of anger, and I cannot admit the irrationality of love.”

“Memory was a curse, yes, he thought, but it was also the greatest gift. Because if you lost memory you lost everything.”

“We shall live even in this state of living death, we shall love, we shall feel, we shall defy all who would judge and destroy us.”

“Don't be a fool for the Devil, darling.”

“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.”

“Don't be a pawn in somebody's game. Find the attitude which gives you the maximum strength and the maximum dignity, no matter what else is going on”

“There are so many books I mean to read, and things I mean to see.”