"Ah, come now. I look like an angel, but I'm not. The old rules of nature encompass many creatures like me. We're beautiful like the diamond-backed snake, or the striped tiger, yet we're merciless killers."

- - - Lestat

Anne Rice

"I'm trimmed in memories as if in old furs. I lift my arm and the sleeve of memory covers it. I look around and see other times. But you know what frightens me the most -- it is that this state, like so many others with me, will prove the verge of nothing but extend itself over centuries."

- - - Armand

Anne Rice

"What I think is that when you make a book, you tell the tale as you would like to know it!"

"I see no great wisdom in that."

"Well, then think, for most speech is a mere issue of our feelings, a mere explosion. Listen, note the way that you make these outbursts."

"I don't want to."

"But you do, but they are not the words you want to read. When you write, something different happens. You make a tale, no matter how fragmented or experimental or how disregarding of all conventional and helpful forms. Try this for me."

- - - David and Armand

Anne Rice

"We are thrown back on our words like mortals, only our senses are infinitely keener, and the detachment we know at some times will enflame us, carry us on waves of burning sea."

- - - Pandora

Anne Rice

"You can cover your white faces in greasepaint, and your extravagant gestures and facial expressions won't even be noticed. You couldn't choose a more perfect disguise than that ... You could be seen by thousands who'd never guess what you are."

- - - Lestat

Anne Rice

�"But how do you know for certain?"

Short little velvet laugh. "There you go again. So irrepressibly human. You overestimate me or underestimate me. Seldom do you hit the mark."

- - - Daniel and Armand

Anne Rice

"But where are we really?" Daniel asked. "Tell me!"

"I told you. It's just a dream. But if you want a name, let me call it the gateway of life and death. I'll bring you with me through this gateway. And why? Because I am a coward. And I love you too much to let you go."

- - - Daniel and Armand

Anne Rice

"I tell you, we would be hard put to determine what is more evil -- religion or the pure idea. The intervention of the supernatural or the elegant abstract solution! Both have bathed this earth in suffering; both have brought the human race literally and figuratively to its knees."

- - - Maharet

Anne Rice

"I imagine drinking wine until I'm so drunk I strip off my clothes and bathe in the mountain streams naked... And then I imagine going into the village... and up into the inn and taking into my bed any men that come there -- crude men, big men, old men, boys. Just lying there and taking them one after the other, and feeling some magnificent triumph in it, some absolute release without a thought of what happens to your father and brothers, whether they are alive or dead. In that moment I am purely myself. I belong to no one."

- - - Gabrielle

Anne Rice

"Yet the bitterness inside me did not subside.

I never forgot what it had been like when I was Lelio. I became a little crueler for what had happened, and I never, never went again to the village fair. I conceieved of the notion that I should never get away from here, and oodly enough as my despair deepened, so my usefulness increased.

I alone put the fear of God into the servants or tenants by the time I was eighteen. I alone provided the food for us. And for some strange reason this gave me satisfaction. I don't know why, but I liked to sit at the table and reflect that everyone there was eating what I had provided."

- - - Lestat

Anne Rice

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