Quotes from book

The Vampire Lestat

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

“I am an unwilling devil. I cry like some vagrant child. I want to go home.”

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

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

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

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

“I stumble through a carnival of horrors”

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

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

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

“Hell's Bells ringing, my secret music…”

“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.”

“No one is safe from nature's savagery, not even the innocent. Only beauty is consistent.
Gabrielle envisions a time when the Savage Garden will overtake civilizations and destroy it.”

“Strong women are absolutely unpredictable.”

“Words. Borne on the ever swelling current of hatred, like flowers opening in the current, petals peeling back, then falling apart.”

“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.”

“Doesn't matter now, devils who paint angels.”

“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.”

“Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past.”