Anne Rice - The Vampire Lestat (1985)

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

Anne Rice
Even if a ghost is ripping a house to pieces, throwing tin pans all over, pouring water on pillows, making clocks chime at all hours, mortals will accept almost any 'natural explanation' offered, no matter how absurd, rather than the obvious supernatural one, for what is going on.

Anne Rice
One will hate you for taking his life, another will run to excesses that you scorn. A third will emerge mad and raving, another a monster you cannot control. One will be jealous of your superiority, another shut you out... And the veil will always come down between you Make a legion, you will be, always and forever alone!

Anne Rice
Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world. Mortal or immortal, few really ASK. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds.

Anne Rice
I was the vampire Lestat again. I was back in action. New Orleans was once again my hunting ground.

Anne Rice
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.

Anne Rice
Whatever will happen will happen, but choose your companions with care. Choose them because you like to look at them and you like the sound of their voices, and they have profound secrets in them that you wish to know. In other words, choose them because you love them. Otherwise you will not be able to bear their company for very long.

Anne Rice
We're going to die and not even know. We'll never know, and all this meaninglessness will just go on and on and on. And we won't any longer be witnesses to it. We won't have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We'll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing!

Anne Rice
From my stone pillow I have dreamed dreams of the mortal world above. I have heard its voices, its new music, as lullabies as I lie in my grave. I have envisioned its fantastical discoveries. I have known its courage in the timeless sanctum of my thoughts. And though it shuts me out with its dazzling forms, I long for one with the strength to roam it fearlessly, to ride the Devil's Road through its heart.

Anne Rice
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.

Anne Rice
All the stories I have told you are finally as useless as all ancient knowledge is to man and to us. Its images and its poetry can be beautiful; it can make us shiver with the recognition 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.

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

Anne Rice
The truth is most women are weak, be they mortal or immortal. But when they are strong, they are absolutely unpredictable.

Anne Rice
I kept glancing at him and away from him, as if his green eyes were hurting me. In modern parlance he was a laser beam. Deadly and delicate he seemed. His victims had always loved him. And I had always loved him, hadn't I, no matter what happened, and how strong could love grow if you had eternity to nourish it, and it took only these few moments in time to renew its momentum, its heat? -Lestat

Anne Rice
Because," she said, "that is what men would call it. They invented Satan, didn't they? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which men want to live.

Anne Rice
An evil for these times destined to move through the world in handsome human guise.

Anne Rice
Old truths and ancient magic, revolution and invention, all conspire to distract us from the passion that in one way or another defeats us all.

Anne Rice
No one is safe from nature's savagery, not even the innocent. Only beauty is consistent.

Anne Rice
An intoxication with forbidden knowledge in which the natural things become unimportant.

Anne Rice
It's not so," I said. "And how long do you think it will sustain you, feeling and seeing and touching and tasting, if there is no love? No one with you?

Anne Rice
A singer can shatter glass with the proper high note... but the simplest way to break glass is simply to drop it on the floor.

Anne Rice
We breathe the light, we breathe the music, we breathe the moment as it passes through us.

Anne Rice
To be godless is probably the first step to innocence," he said, "to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost." So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions." An absence of need for illusions," he said. "A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes.

Anne Rice
Maybe a new religion will rise now. Maybe without it, man will crumble in cynicism and selfishness because he really needs his gods.

Anne Rice
As for oblivion, well, we can wait a little while for that.

Anne Rice
I will be the Vampire Lestat for all to see. A symbol, a freak of nature - something loved, something despised all of those things. I tell you I can't give it up. I can't miss. And quite frankly I am not in the least afraid.

Anne Rice
I am an unwilling devil. I cry like some vagrant child. I want to go home.

Anne Rice
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.

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

Anne Rice
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.

Anne Rice