Anne Rice

My life's been too much of a self-created vocation. And there are times when I think I've done everything in the name of defiance.

It draws it's strength, this big secret, from the same root from which I draw my strength, both the good and the bad, because in the end, they cannot be separated.

You were the vampire in my dream. My perfect one.

One tiny flame could make so many other flames; one tiny flame could set afire a whole world.

Our language needs endless synonyms for beautiful; the eyes could see what the tongue cannot possibly describe.

We’re going to die and not even know. We’ll never know, and all this meaninglessness will just go on and on and on. And we won’t any longer be witnesses to it. We won’t have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We’ll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing!

I picture heaven as a vast library, with unlimited volumes to read. And paintings and statues to examine galore. I picture it as a great doorway to learning...rather than one great dull answer to all our questions

You sense my loneliness, (...) my bitterness at being shut out of life. My bitterness that I'm evil, that I don't deserve to be loved and yet I need love hungrily. My horror that I can never reveal myself to mortals. But these things don't stop me, Mother. I'm too strong for them to stop me. As you said yourself once, I am very good at being what I am. These things merely now and then make me suffer, that's all

And I loved this moment for all it's pain...We seemed for a moment like two parts of the same thing.

Anger is too pathetic. Anger is as weak as fear.

...what was the good of being a movie werewolf? You howled at the moon; you couldn't remember what you did, and then somebody shot you.

When we talk about our lives, long or short, brief and tragic or enduring beyond comprehension, we impose a continuity on them, and that continuity is a lie.

But all morality is of necessity shaped by context. I'm not talking relativism, no. To ignore the context of a decision is in fact immoral.

I'm hoping what all sentient beings hope ... that somehow I'm part of something larger than myself, in which I play a role, an actual role that is somehow intended and meaningful.

Oh, if the moon only had a secret, if the moon only held a truth. But the moon was just the moon.

He had never expected death to be this quiet, this secretive, this easy.

All the stories I have told you are finally as useless as all ancient knowledge is to man and to us. Its images and its poetry can be beautiful; it can make us shiver with the recognition of things we have always suspected or felt. It can draw us back to times when the earth was new to man, and wondrous. But always we come back to the way the earth is now.

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.

Because," she said, "that is what men would call it. They invented Satan, didn't they? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which men want to live.

And this lesson about mortal peace of mind I never forgot. Even if a ghost is ripping a house to pieces, throwing in pans all over, pouring water of pillows, making clocks chime at all hours, mortal will accept almost any "natural explanation" offered, no matter how absurd, rather than the obvious supernatural one, for what is going on.

I lived like a man who wanted to die but who had no courage to do it himself.