Monday, April 9, 2012

The Vampire Lestat Quotes: Part III

The Early Education and Adventures of the Vampire Lestat:

The Legacy of Magnus (p. 79-148)

"And yet my grief was not entirely gone from me. It lingered like an idea, and that idea had a pure truth to it." (p. 99)

"Do devils love each other? Do they walk arm in arm in hell saying, "Ah, you are my friend, how I love you," things like that to each other? It was a rather detached intellectual question I was asking, as I did not believe in hell. But it was a matter of concept of evil, wasn't it? All creatures in hell are supposed to hate one another, as all the saved hate the damned, without reservation." (p. 102)

"Well, now I know, whether I believe in hell or not, that vampires can love each other, that in being dedicated to evil, one does not cease to love." (p. 102)

"Sometimes I was simply crying out in something like joy. It had to be joy. But how could a monster feel joy? (p. 113)

"And in desperation, I went up over the Communion rail and put my hands on the tabernacle itself. I broke open its tiny little doors, and I reached in a took out the jeweled ciborium with its consecrated Hosts. No, there was no power here, nothing that I could feel or see or know with any of my monstrous senses, nothing that responded to me. There were wafers and gold and wax and light. (p. 113)

"The Long vibrant notes, and the chilling glissandos, and the violin singing in its own  tongue to make every other form of speech seem false." (p. 130)

"Beauty wasn't the treachery he imagined it to be, rather it was an uncharted land where one could make a thousand fatal errors, a wild and indifferent paradise without signposts of evil or good." (p. 131)

"Beauty was a Savage Garden...Good and evil, those are concepts man has made. And man is better, really, than the Savage Garden." (p.131)

"But maybe deep inside Nicki had always dreamed of a harmony among all things that I had always known was impossible. Nicki had dreamed not of goodness, but of justice." (p.131)

"How to describe what humans look like to us...There are those billion of colors and tiny configurations of movement, yes, that make up a living creature on whom we concentrate. But the radiance mingles totally with the carnal scent. Beautiful, that's what any human being is to us, if we stop to consider it, even the old and the diseased, the downtrodden that one doesn't really "see" in the street. They are all like that, like flowers ever in the process of opening, butterflies ever unfolding out of the cocoon." (p. 134)

"But I was mad in these moments. To say I wanted or I thought makes no sense at all...I knew the madness of the course I'd chosen, and the lie of it, and what I really was. What a sublime idiocy that I had dragged that paltry morality with me, striking down the damned ones only--seeking to be saved in spite of it all? What had I thought I was, a righteous partner to the judges and executioners of Paris who strike down the poor for crimes that the rich commit everyday?" (p. 135)

"Strong wine I'd had, in chipped and broken vessels, and now the priest was standing before me at the foot of the altar with the golden chalice in his hands, and the wine inside it was the Blood of the Lamb." (p. 135)

"But the words were really beyond my reach. They floated in some stratum perhaps where a god existed who understood the colors patterned on a cobra's skin and the eight glorious notes that make up the music erupting out of Nicki's instrument, but never the principle, beyond ugliness or beauty, "Thou shalt not kill." (p. 137)

From "The Vampire Lestat" by Anne Rice
Take a look back at my quotes and highlights:

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