anne-rice

For what can the damned really have to say to the damned?

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.

What lurked beneath my fancy frills, behind my quiet unquestioning eyes? Who was I? Had I no remembrance of a warmer flame than that which gave its wintry glow to my faint smile at those who asked it of me? I remembered no one who had ever lived and breathed within my quietly moving form~ The Vampire Armand

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

Lestat: I despise you! I ought to destroy you-finish what I started when I made you. Turn you into ashes and sift them through my hands. You know that I could do it! Like that! Like the snap of mortal fingers, I could do it. Burn you as I burnt your little house. And nothing could save you, nothing at all.

Lestat: You're very anxious to be out of these rooms, aren't you? Why don't we simply get into bed together? I don't understand.David: You're serious?Lestat: Of courseDavid: You do realize, that this is an absolutely magnificent body, don't you? I mean you aren't insensible to the fact that you've been deposited in a...a most impressive piece of young male flesh.Lestat: I looked it over well before the switch, remember? Why is it you don't want to..David: You've been with a woman, haven't you?Lestat: I wish you hadn't read my mind. It's rude. Besides, what does that matter to you?David: A woman you loved.Lestat: I have always loved both men and women.David: That's a slightly different use of the word 'love.

Lestat: Toughen up baby. I'm looking for the eternal scum.

I watched him rise from the coffin, with slow, elegant gestures; our gestures, for we are the only beings who routinely rise from coffins.

Alas, my being the James Bond of vampires isn't the whole issue. Vanity must wait.

We are the things that others fear," I said. "Remember that.

After all, these were blood drinkers, beings who spoke gently, liked poetry, and yet killed mortals all the time.

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 -justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can't go on. To really ask is to open the door to the whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.

You let me handle Marius," I said. "Now, you didn't come without you dagger.""No, I did not," he said, lifting his cloak to reveal it, "And with your permission I would like to plunge it through my heart now so I will most assuredly stone-cold dead before the Master of this house arrives home to find you runnning rampant in his garden!""Permission denied.

I was still sitting there, too unsure of myself to say anything, when Nicolas kissed me.'Let's go to bed,' he said softly.

Maybe we do go home, finally.

I had to have him, had to. Just the way I had to have everything I wanted; or had to do everything I'd ever wanted to do.

To be human, that's what most of us long for. It is the human which has become myth to us.

...But still, even now, to think of it, I feel something akin to that happiness. And I've more reason now than ever to say that happiness is not what I will ever know, or will ever deserve to know. I am not so much in love with happiness. Yet the name Paris makes me feel it.