Anne Rice Quotes & Sayings

Armand keeps the island of Manhattan safe for them - Louis, Armand, and two young blood drinkers, Benjamin and Sybelle, and whoever else joins them in their palatial digs on the Upper East Side. — Anne Rice

My hands were ... my strange white, slender, glittering hands. — Anne Rice

Many Christians believe that the vast majority of those created by God will burn in Hell for All Eternity. Many Christians not only believe the world will end soon, but are looking forward to it. I MUST WALK AWAY FROM IT ALL. IN JESUS' NAME. — Anne Rice

They know how bad they are. They don't care. They do what they do because ... because they love it. — Anne Rice

We have the future now," she whispered. "Does it matter that we've wasted so many opportunities to meet in the past? — Anne Rice

I wish I could," laughed the vampire. "How positively delightful. I should like to pass through all manner of different keyholes and feel the tickle of their peculiar shapes. No." He shook his head. "That is, how would you say today ... bullshit? — Anne Rice

It was as if this night were only one of thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into night to make a great arching line of which I couldn't see the end, a night in which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars. — Anne Rice

Treasure the pain; treasure what you have with her, including the fear. Treasure what you may have, including the failure. Treasure it because if we don't live this life, if we don't live it to the fullest year after year and century after century, well, then, we die. — Anne Rice

Protect your voice and your vision. If going on the Internet and reading Internet reviews is bad for you, don't do it. ... Do what gets you to write and not what blocks you. ... Don't take any guff off anybody. — Anne Rice

His hands would soon be trembling and he would have indigestion, but he didn't care. When you love coffee you abandon everything to that love. — Anne Rice

St. Augustine wrote something once, something I think about often," he said. " 'God triumphs on the ruins of our plans.' And maybe that is what is happening here. We make blunders, we make mistakes, and somehow new doors open, new possibilities arise, opportunities of which we've never dreamed. — Anne Rice

If only we would wake from (these) states of oblivion with some certain sense that there was no mystery to life at all, that cruelty was purely impersonal, but we don't. — Anne Rice

I no longer represent any organized religion. I'm not Catholic. I'm not Christian. I'm saying this because I have to be an outsider for Christ. — Anne Rice

I can't believe the world was created in six days. I do not take Genesis or Revelation literally. I AM OUT. I am alone. I am an outsider for Christ. I will study my Bible, and pray to God in private and alone. I have no other choice. — Anne Rice

In his refusal to believe in anything supernatural or inherently evil, he was as unrealistic as an old voodoo queen who sees spirits everywhere. — 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, and nothing ... not even this mortal body ... is going to defeat me. — Anne Rice

Well, I am no village cunning woman, no frightened merry-begot, but a woman born to riches, and
educated from the time I can remember, and given all that I could possibly desire. And now in my
twenty-second year, already a mother and soon perhaps to be a widow, I rule in this place. I ruled
before my mother gave to me all her secrets, and her great familiar, Lasher, and I mean to study this
thing, and make use of it, and allow it to enhance my considerable strength. — Anne Rice

You haven't found all the answers yet. Electricity, telephones, these are lovely magic. But the poor go unfed. Men kill for what they cannot gain by their own labour. How to share the magic, the riches, the secrets, that is still the problem. — Anne Rice

He was shaking his head, biting into his lower lip, fighting the sheer misery of the anticipation, when he realized that another figure was standing directly opposite, on the other side of the fire, quite visible above the leaping flames, gazing at him. — Anne Rice

It was the night that the power went out in Berkeley that he'd finished Joyce's Finnegan's Wake by the light of a candle. Sometimes you need to be forced to study what's right in front of you. — Anne Rice

Deep in my mind a thought did flash for a moment that one who commands must of necessity be wildly imperfect, boldly pragmatic, capable of compromises impossible for the truly wise and the truly good. — Anne Rice

I do not allow fan-fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan-fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes. — Anne Rice

One time Gifford had asked Mona: "What's the difference between men and women?" Mona had said: "Men don't know what can happen. They're happy. But women know everything that can happen. They worry all the time. — Anne Rice

Curses of vanished elders echoed down on me; too pretty, too soft, too pale, eyes far too full of the Devil, ah, that devilish smile — Anne Rice

Everything we do in life, we do with certain expectations. — Anne Rice

But I still did not realize how mad she was, and how accustomed to dreaming; and that she would not cry out for reality, rather would feed reality to her dreams, a demon elf feeding her spinning wheel with the reeds of the world so she might make her own weblike universe. — Anne Rice

The evil of one murder is infinite, and my guilt is like my beauty - eternal. I cannot be forgiven, for there is no one to forgive me for all I've done. — Anne Rice

My own funeral, I'd like to be laid out in a coffin in my own house. I would like my coffin to be put in the double parlor, and I would like all the flowers to be white. — Anne Rice

we do good when we make others forget their sorrow, make them forget for a little while — Anne Rice

But you love books, then," Aunt Queen was saying. I had to listen.
"Oh, yes," Lestat said. "Sometimes they are the only thing that keeps me alive."
"What a strange thing to say at your age," she laughed.
"No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don't you think? The young are eternally desperate," he said frankly. "And books, they offer one hope - - that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that new universe, one is saved. — Anne Rice

I saw the great sparkling orbs of his eyes, the tiny red veins that reached for the dark centers, that warm hand burning my cold hunger as he guided me to a chair. And then all around me I saw faces blazing, faces rising in the smoke of the lamps, in the shimmer of the burning stove, a wonderland of colors on canvases surrounding us beneath the small, sloped roof, a blaze of beauty that pulsed and throbbed. — Anne Rice

And I had the most disconcerting sensation: that in my memory she would look up from that game of solitaire and the sockets of her eyes would be empty. — Anne Rice

Love. Who knows about another's love? The more you love the more you know the burnt out loss of love, the more you heed the silence of unknowing in the face of another's spiritual bondage. — Anne Rice

It's an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater lustre to our colours, a richer resonance to our words. — Anne Rice

Write the book you want to read — Anne Rice

And how is evil achieved?" He asked. "How does one fall from grace and become in one instant as evil as the mob tribunal of the revolution or the most cruel of the Roman emperors? Does one merely have to miss mass on Sunday or bite down on the communion host? Or steal a loaf of bread ... or sleep with a neighbor's wife. — Anne Rice

Delicately he put the tiny needle to its task upon the revolving record. A thin and rasping Vienna waltz poured forth from the metal horn. I laughed to see it, this sweet invention, set before them like an offering. Was the waltz like incense rising in the air? But — Anne Rice

We seek to perfect what we are, not to constantly alter it. We seek to find something that is a true expression of our soul with which to shape what makes up our form. But there's no need for you to trouble yourself over these things. — Anne Rice

Phil was mumbling that Reuben might become a writer after all and writers had a way of redeeming everything that ever happens to them. — Anne Rice

Oh, the lies that I have told myself and others. I knew it yet I didn't know. — Anne Rice

And so a ghost of him had been created by her hatred and her rage. It was fading, yet it still stalked her, even here in the safe hallways of her own domain. — Anne Rice

If drugs really numb your consciousness, they'd be a good thing. As it was, they slowed you down, confused you, kept you vulnerable to violent flashes of recall, and then agitated you and made you unsure of what you knew and didn't know. — 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

I was obsessed with religious questions, the basics: Why are we here? Why is the world so beautiful? — Anne Rice

Go where the pleasure is in your writing. Go where the pain is. Write the book you would like to read. Write the book you have been trying to find but have not found. But write. And remember, there are no rules for our profession. Ignore rules. Ignore what I say here if it doesn't help you. Do it your own way. Every writer knows fear and discouragement. Just write.The world is crying for new writing. It is crying for fresh and original voices and new characters and new stories. If you won't write the classics of tomorrow, well, we will not have any. — Anne Rice

As Christians, I feel those of us in the creative community must seek to be more than scribes. If Diarmaid MacColloch is right in his immense history, The Reformation, we had plenty of Christian scribes on the eve of that enormous and painful upheaval. But it was the printing press that enabled the great thinkers of that time, both Reformer and Catholic, to transform our "assumptions about knowledge and originality of thought." I suggest now that we must seize the revolutionary media of our age in the way that those earlier Christians and Catholics seized the printed book. We must truly use the realistic novel, the television drama, and the motion picture to tell the Christian story anew. It is our obligation to tell that story over and over and to use the best means that we have. In that spirit this novel was written - with the hope of exploring and celebrating the mystery of the Hypostatic Union as well as the mystery of the Incarnation - in a wholly fresh way. — Anne Rice

It's so easy to wish for death when nothing's wrong with you! It's so easy to fall in love with death, and I've been all my life, and seen it's most faithful worshippers crumble in the end, screaming just to live, as if all the dark veils and the lillies and the smell of candles, and grandiose promises of the grave meant nothing. I knew that. But I always wished I was dead. It was a way to go on living — Anne Rice

He was so rapt in his thoughts that he did not hear anything much that Guido was saying, that lovely bubbling speech of Guido's when he was at last content.
Tonio allowed it to pass over him, and now and then he would give a little gracious nod. — Anne Rice

I wasn't sent here to find angels! I wasn't sent here to dream of them. I wasn't sent here to hear them sing! I was sent here to be alive. To breathe and sweat and thirst and sometimes cry. — Anne Rice

You know nothing ... And suppose the vampire who made you knew nothing, and the vampire who made that vampire knew nothing, and the vampire before him knew nothing, and so it goes back and back, nothing proceeding from nothing, until there is nothing! And we must live with the knowledge that there is no knowledge. — Anne Rice

I confided again that I wanted him, I wanted him to share my loneliness. I wanted him to share all that I could teach and give. Oh, the pain of it! All that I could teach and give. — Anne Rice

Do you think that angels are detached?" asked — Anne Rice

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

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

A perfect world or a world destroyed, one or the other- someday will come the end of hell. — Anne Rice

Writing is what we do for a living; reviewing is what gangster bullies do for fun! — Anne Rice

So you're saying that demons aren't as smart as angels." "Perhaps they could be," he said, "but their state of mind interferes with their intelligence. It interferes with their observations, and their conclusions. It interferes with everything that they do. Theirs is a hideous predicament. They refuse to admit that they have lost." That was beautiful. I liked it. I liked the puzzle of it and the truth of it. — Anne Rice

Woman rescued by Yeti!'How dare they make this into a joke. — Anne Rice

Strong women are absolutely unpredictable. — Anne Rice

The spirit who inhabits her animates us all. Destroy the host, you destroy the power. The young die first; the old wither slowly; the eldest perhaps would go last. But she is the Queen of the Damned, and the Damned can't live without her. — Anne Rice

The highest truths a person could discover were rooted in the natural world. — Anne Rice

Because if the Romans, the Greeks, the Hebrew scholars, and the Christians all describe the same entities, and issue the same warnings and formulae for controlling them, then surely that is something not to be dismissed. — Anne Rice

But Marchent, most journalists can't be trusted. You do know that, don't you? — Anne Rice

And it isn't only that I don't believe it. I can't. "I can't believe it because my reason tells me that such a system, in which anyone dictates our every move - be it a god, or a devil, or our subconscious mind, or our tyrannical genesis simply impossible. "Life itself must be founded upon the infinite possibility for choice and accident. And if we cannot prove that it is, we must believe that it is. We must believe that we can change, that we can control, that we can direct our own destinies. — Anne Rice

she seemed to me an intriguing soul clothed — Anne Rice

Ignore any loss of nerve, ignore any loss of self-confidence, ignore any doubt or confusion. Move on believing in love, in peace, and harmony, and in great accomplishment. Remember joy isn't a stranger to you. You are winning and you are strong. Love. Love first, love always, love forever. — Anne Rice

In fact, she had the neuter-gender quality of an angel. — Anne Rice

What is fear after all? It is indecision. You seek some way to resist, escape. There is none. — Anne Rice

None of us really changes over time. We only become more fully what we are. — Anne Rice

With his finger curled under his lip, his elbow on the arm of the couch, he merely studied me as I recounted the memories, and now he was eager for the tale to go on. — Anne Rice

I feel the darkness near me; I feel the light shining. And more keenly I feel the contrast between the two. — Anne Rice

An accidental chaos blindly serving up the unaccountable beauty he now saw — Anne Rice

We half to make our lives meaningful in spite of what we don't know. — Anne Rice

He can see us, said the angel who had been gesturing so pointedly. His voice was subdued but seemed to reach my ears effortlessly and gently. — Anne Rice

You think anything is possible. But that isn't so. The world closes tight around this miracle soon enough; and you don't hope for other miracles. — Anne Rice

It is tragic that many in America think of us - Christians - as being people who hate others. — Anne Rice

Cities have distinct personalities. It's a matter of knowing it. — Anne Rice

But again that sense of peace descended, that spell of perfect happiness, and I was traveling back through the years to the little French church of my childhood as the hymns began. Through my tears I saw the shining altar. I saw the icon of the Virgin, a gleaming square of gold above the flowers; I heard the Aves whispered as if they were a charm. Under the arches of Notre Dame de Paris I heard the priests singing Salve Regina. — Anne Rice

That morning I was not yet a vampire, and I saw my last sunrise. I remember it completely, and yet I can't recall any sunrise before it. I watched its whole magnificence for the last time as if it were the first. And then I said farewell to sun light, and set out to become what I became. — Anne Rice

In a daze, I saw him stretch out his arms to me. It struck me that never in all my life had I beheld anyone quite as beautiful as he was, and it was not merely the sum of his physical attributes, it was the pure serenity, the essence that I perceived with my innermost soul. A lovely euphoria came over me as he spoke. — Anne Rice

He'll take from your mind the answer best suited to lead you on, to enthrall you. He'll weave a web of deceits so thick you won't see the world through it. He wants your strength and he'll say what he must say to get it. Break the chain, child! You're the strongest of them all! Break the chain and he'll go back
to hell for he has no other place to go in all the wide world to find strength like yours. Don't you see?
He's created it. Bred sister to brother, and uncle to niece, and son to mother, yes, that too, when he had
to do it, to make an ever more powerful witch, only faltering now and then, and gaining what he lost in one generation by even greater strength in the next. What was the cost of Antha and Deirdre if he could have a Rowan! — Anne Rice

The Cardinal was bent over his writing desk, the room unchanged save for the light of what appeared a small antique oil lamp. And there were illuminated letters in the book before him, tiny figures fitted into the capitals, the whole gleaming as he let his hand, quivering, turn the page.
"Ah, think of it," he said, smiling as he saw Tonio, "written language the possession of those who took such pains to preserve it. I am forever entranced with the forms in which knowledge is given us, not by nature, but by our fellow man. — Anne Rice

Yes, you are right, those of us who are known to everyone today are romantics. We are. We are poets. But we are individuals, with an immense faith in the individual and a love of the individual. — Anne Rice

I'm always looking, and I'm always asking questions. — Anne Rice

There are times when one simply cannot say no. — Anne Rice

You reflect your age differently. You reflect its broken heart. — Anne Rice

And there were moments in this fetid little paradise when I prayed that in spite of everything I was capable of, I was somehow kin to every mortal. Maybe I was not the exotic outcast that I imagined, but merely the dim magnification of every human soul. 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. And weary finally of this complexity, we dream of that long-ago time when each kiss was the pefect consummation of desire. What can we do but reach for the embrace that must now contain both heaven and hell: our doom again and again and agian. — Anne Rice

Give me the heartbeat. Give me the salt. Give me the Viaticum. Fill my mouth. — Anne Rice

I am not times fool, nor a god hardened by the millennia; I am not the trickster in the black cape nor the sorrowful wanderer. I have a conscience. I know right from wrong I know what I do and yes, I do it. I am the Vampire Lestat. That's your answer do with it as you will. — Anne Rice

I knelt and prayed, and the strongest truth came over me. Didn't matter if God in his heaven was a Catholic or a Protestant God, or the God of the Hindus. What mattered was something deeper and older and more powerful than any such image - it was a concept of goodness based upon the affirmation of life, the turning away from destruction, from the perverse, from man using and abusing man. It was the affirmation of the human and the natural. — Anne Rice

She said that no system based on arcana or esoteric knowledge would survive this age. No new revealed religion could take hold in it. — Anne Rice

In your love for one another, I heard the echo of Heaven. — Anne Rice

The sky was growing dangerously light when I left Lestat and made my way to the secret place, below an abandoned building where I kept the iron coffin in which I lie.
This is no unusual configuration among our kind-the sad old building, my title to it, or the cellar room cut off from the world above by iron doors no mortal could independently seek to lift. — Anne Rice

I looked up and saw myself in a most palpable vision ascending the altar steps, opening the tiny sacrosanct tabernacle, reaching with monstrous hands for the consecrated ciborium, and taking the Body of Christ and strewing Its white wafers all over the carpet; and walking then on the sacred wafers, walking up and down before the altar, giving Holy Communion to the dust. I rose up now in the pew and stood there staring at this vision. I knew full well the meaning of it. God did not live in this church; these statues gave an image to nothingness, I was the supernatural in this cathedral. I was the only supermortal thing that stood conscious under this roof! — Anne Rice

You have a light in you that's almost blinding. But in me there's only darkness. Sometimes I think it's 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't need the darkness. — Anne Rice

Life is a tragedy, one way or another. What is certain is that you die. — Anne Rice

I know this kind of person. I've known them all my life. They get the sympathy of others with what passes for insecurity. But what really motivates them is a vanity so immense most of us can not conceive of it. Insecurity is simply a disguise. — Anne Rice

Hauntings only repeat what occurred once upon a time. — Anne Rice

And a sad realization drifted through my head, something to do with how young she was, how good she looked in any light, how light didn't make the slightest difference with her. And how old I was, and how all young people, even plain young people, had begun to look beautiful to me. — Anne Rice