Quotes
List here any quote, from Anne Rice's book Interview With the Vampire. Quotes that inspire you, or give you a strong visual image, or maybe you just admire the author's use of words ..... poetic, lyrical, straightforward, cultural, etc ...
We are reading Interview With the Vampire in celebration of Anne Rice's birthday: October 4, 1941. “Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.” Anne Rice & Larry King Interview Anne Rice | Prince Lestat (Live @ Free Library of Philadelphia) Interview With the Vampire (1994) Trailer
The moon was large over the cypresses, and the candlelight poured from the open doors. The thick plastered pillars and walls of the house had been freshly whitewashed, the floorboards freshly swept, and a summer rain had left the night clean and sparkling with drops of water. I leaned against the end pillar of the gallery, my head touching the soft tendrils of jasmine which grew there in constant battle with a wisteria, and I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another.
ReplyDeleteDo you understand me when I say I did not wish to rush headlong into experience, that what I’d felt as a vampire was far too powerful to be wasted?
ReplyDelete“Yes,” said the boy eagerly. “It sounds as if it was like being in love.”
I was wondering... did you have a special feeling for Babette?
ReplyDelete... “You mean love,” said the vampire. “Why do you hesitate to say it?”
“Because you spoke of detachment,” said the boy.
“Do you think that angels are detached?” asked the vampire.
The boy thought for a moment. “Yes,” he said.
“But aren’t angels capable of love?” asked the vampire. “Don’t angels gaze upon the face of God with complete love?” The boy thought for a moment. “Love or adoration,” he said.
“What is the difference?” asked the vampire thoughtfully. “What is the difference?” It was clearly not a riddle for the boy. He was asking himself. “Angels feel love, and pride... the pride of The Fall ... and hatred.”
Evil is a point of view.
ReplyDeleteAfter days of her usual quiet, she would scoff suddenly at Lestat's predictions about the war; or drinking blood from a crystal glass say that there were no books in the house, we must get more even if we had to steal them, and then coldly tell me of a library she'd heard of, in a palatial mansion in the Faubourg Dt.-Marie, a woman who collected books as if they were rocks or pressed butterflies. She asked if I might get her into the woman's bedroom.
ReplyDelete“I’ve indicated to you I would not then kill people. I moved along the rooftop in search of rats.”
ReplyDelete“But why ... you’ve said Lestat shouldn’t have made you start with people. Did you mean ... do you mean for you it was an aesthetic choice, not a moral one?”
“Had you asked me then, I would have told you it was aesthetic, that I wished to understand death in stages. That the death of an animal yielded such pleasure and experience to me that I had only begun to understand it, and wished to save the experience of human death for my mature understanding. But it was moral. Because all aesthetic decisions are moral, really.”
“I don’t understand,” said the boy. “I thought aesthetic decisions could be completely immoral. What about the cliché of the artist who leaves his wife and children so he can paint? Or Nero playing the harp while Rome burned?”
“Both were moral decisions. Both served a higher good, in the mind of the artist. The conflict lies between the morals of the artist and the morals of society, not between aesthetics and morality. But often this isn't understood; and here comes the waste, the tragedy. An artist stealing paints from a store, for example, imagines himself to have made an inevitable but moral decision, and then he sees himself as fallen from grace; what follows is despair and petty irresponsibility, as if morality were a great glass world which can be utterly shattered in one act.
Locked together in hatred.
ReplyDelete“What was it like . . . making love?”
ReplyDelete“It was something hurried . . . it was seldom savored . . . something acute that was quickly lost. I think it was the pale shadow of killing. “
. . . I believed I would gather you to me and hold you. And time would open to us, and we would be teachers of one another. All the things that gave you happiness would give me happiness; and I would be the protector of your pain. My power would be your power. My strength the same.
ReplyDelete