I like to read things I've read before. It's like listening over and over to your favorite song.
Interpretation
Revisiting familiar texts can evoke comfort and joy, similar to listening to a beloved song repeatedly.
Anne Rice's quote emphasizes the pleasure and fulfillment that comes from re-engaging with familiar literature. Just as a favorite song can evoke nostalgia and comfort, rereading books allows readers to reconnect with stories and ideas that resonate deeply with them, offering a sense of security and joy in their familiarity.
In practice
In a book club discussion about favorite genres.
From my stone pillow I have dreamed dreams of the mortal world above. I have heard its voices, its new music, as lullabies as I lie in my grave. I have envisioned its fantastical discoveries. I have known its courage in the timeless sanctum of my thoughts. And though it shuts me out with its dazzling forms, I long for one with the strength to roam it fearlessly, to ride the Devil's Road through its heart.
We all suffer under a curse, the curse that we know more than we can endure, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing we can do about the force and the lure of this knowledge.
And so this young one, this young one whom I had so loved, I had to forsake, no matter how broken my heart, no matter how lonely my soul, no matter how bruised my intellect and spirit.
Dear God, help me. Do not forget me on this tiny cinder lost in a galaxy that is lostβa heart no bigger than a speck of dust beating, beating against death, against meaninglessness, against guilt, against sorrow.
The vampires have always been metaphors for me. They've always been vehicles through which I can express things I have felt very, very deeply.
In the very depths of Hell, do not demons love one another?
Open your mind to what I shall disclose, and hold it fast within you; he who hears, but does not hold what he has heard, learns nothing. Beatrice - Canto V 40-42
We read to find ourselves, more fully and more strangely than otherwise we could hope to find.
A good example is far better than a good precept.
There's a disease that young writers are susceptible to, which is, I will do this because I can - hubris, I suppose - without stopping to work out why.
We feel strongly that the spirit characteristic of America at its noblest, above all the pursuit of higher learning, cannot admit of any conditions as to personnel other than those designed to promote the objects for which this institution is established, and particularly with no regard whatever to accidents of race, creed, or sex.
You will only get out of a dance class what you bring to it. Learn by practice.
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