Anne Rice

But there is no value to suffering!

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.

There is a horrifying loneliness at work in this time. No, listen to me. We lived six and seven to a room in those days, when I was still among the living. The city streets were seas of humanity; and now in these high buildings dim-witted souls hover in luxurious privacy, gazing through the television window at a faraway world of kissing and touching. It is bound to produce some great fund of common knowledge, some new level of human awareness, a curious skepticism, to be so alone.

But to think there was meaning, a scheme to things, well, that was quite beyond her philosophical reach. She feared as she always had, that all that was ever meant was loneliness, hard work, striving to make a difference when no difference could possibly be made. It was like dipping a stick into the ocean and trying to write something _ all the little people of the world spinning out little patterns that lasted no more than a few years, and meant nothing at all.

It was as if the empty nights were made for thinking of him. And sometimes I found myself so vividly aware of him it was as if he had only just left the room and the ring of his voice were still there. And somehow, there was a disturbing comfort in that, and, despite myself, I__ envision his face.

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

Actors and actresses make magic,' I said. 'They make things happen on the stage; they invent; they create.

Without memory there can be no insight. Without love, there can be no appreciation.

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

Sadness, it was such an arresting emotion. You could almost convince yourself of the rhyme and reason of heartbreak.

She had learnt a painful lesson, she thought _ that as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.

Would that death were like this. Would that one would sleep and sleep and sleep forever.

But Marchent, most journalists can__ be trusted. You do know that, don__ you?

Sometimes it seems that light can transform anything! That it is an undeniable and irreducible metaphor for grace. But do the people of the ranchitos know this? Is it for beauty that they do it? Or do they merely want a comfortable illumination in their little shacks?It doesn't matter.We can't stop ourselves from making beauty. We can't stop the world.

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. The more you understand, the more you look, the greater is your enjoyment of life and your sense of peace. That's all there is to it. Everything else is fun and games. If an activity is not grounded in "to love" or "to learn" it does not have value.

What if the drive to survive was a form of faith, a form of prayer?

You have a light in you that__ almost blinding. But in me there__ only darkness. Sometimes I think it__ like the darkness that infected you that night in the inn when you began to cry and to tremble. You were so helpless, so unprepared for it. I try to keep the darkness from you because I need your light. I need it desperately, but you don__ need the darkness.

And he would listen, making only a few comments, always sympathetic, so that when I left him I had the distinct impression he had solved everything for me.