Top 425 Quotes & Sayings by Anne Rice - Page 5

In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity.

We live in a world full of accidents finally in which on aesthetic principles have a consistency of which we can be sure. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever striving to create and maintain an ethical balance. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever, striving to create and maintain an ethical balance; but the shimmer of summer rain under the street lamps or the great flashing glare of artillery against a night sky – such brutal beauty is beyond dispute.

There are so many books I mean to read, and things I mean to see.

The truth is most women are weak, be they mortal or immortal. But when they are strong, they are absolutely unpredictable.

And then it was, that grief and pain made themselves known to me as never before. Note this, because I knew the full absurdity of Fate and Fortune and Nature more truly than a human can bear to know it. And perhaps the description of this, brief as it is, may give consolation to another. The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass. The truth is, you cannot prepare anyone for this, nor convey an understanding of it through language. It must be known. And this I would wish on no one in the world.

I am afraid of death. I believe nothing, and therefore like many who believe nothing I must make something, and that something is the meaning which I give my life.

That is the crowning evil, that we can even go so far as to love each other, you and I. And who else would show us a particle of love, a particle of compassion or mercy? Who else, knowing us as we know each other, could do anything but destroy us? Yet we can love each other.

This suffering, this unspeakable capacity to bleed and to know pain and to know annihilation, is what has to be overcome in this world if anyone is to reach God.

My efforts with Hollywood are like things written in water.

When you think night and day and every moment only of pleasing me, things will be very easy for you.

In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art--the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard's canvases--beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.

I hear the birds singing. Listen. I hear them in their cage. The others-all our kind who know of her-they think of her as heartless, but she wasn't heartless. She was only aware of things which I didn't learn till so many decades had passed. She knew secrets that only suffering can teach.

Sweet to think on it, that when we are last weary of all this world there is the rising sun

I promised that from now on I would write only for the Lord.

And my heart beat faster for the mountains of eastern Europe, finally, beat faster for the one hope that somewhere we might find in that primitive countryside the answer to why under God this suffering was allowed to exist - why under God it was allowed to begin, and how under God it might be ended. I had not the courage to end it, I knew, without that answer.

The one thing you share with every mortal is death.

My body is no schoolboy.

A story of remarkable simplicity and charm. A young swimmer invites us into sea off the coast of California where through her eyes we see an entire realm of creatures we have never known so intimately before. Truly for people of all ages, Lynne Cox's adventure with the baby whale, Grayson, becomes a parable and an experience, thanks not only to the author's great and generous spirit, but through her immense gift for describing nature.

Louis: You see that old woman? That will never happen to you. You will never grow old, and you will never die. Claudia: And it means something else too, doesn't it? I shall never ever grow up.

My heart right now is totally connected to a book called The Servant of the Bones, which is not in any way connected with vampires or witches. It's about a new hero, a ghost, who really doesn't particularly like the job that he's been given. I'm in love with this hero and in love with his dilemma.

Your quest is for darkness only. This sea is not your sea. The myths of men are not your myths. Men's treasures are not yours.

One will hate you for taking his life, another will run to excesses that you scorn. A third will emerge mad and raving, another a monster you cannot control. One will be jealous of your superiority, another shut you out... And the veil will always come down between you Make a legion, you will be, always and forever alone!

Sometimes fear is a warning. It's like someone putting a hand on your shoulder and saying Go No Farther.

The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass.

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

But don't you see, all human decisions are made like this. Do you think the mother knows what will happen to the child in her womb? Dear God, we are lost, I tell you. What does it matter if you give it to me and it's wrong! There is no wrong! There is only desperation, and I would have it! I want to live forever with you.

There was no point in waiting until the next world. You had to do everything now, every kind of sin.

I kept glancing at him and away from him, as if his green eyes were hurting me. In modern parlance he was a laser beam. Deadly and delicate he seemed. His victims had always loved him. And I had always loved him, hadn't I, no matter what happened, and how strong could love grow if you had eternity to nourish it, and it took only these few moments in time to renew its momentum, its heat? -Lestat

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.

Artists are meant to be madmen, to disturb and shock us.

I felt ravaged, and with both hands in a fantasy I reached out for her figure as we ran together through the meadow which belonged only to us and to which these others could never be admitted."Oh, inocent love," she said even as she drank from me, "oh, innocent innocent love."

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.

This is a lyrical guide that addresses the deep human yearning to make a difference. It's full of indelible stories reminding us that, yes, helping people is hard-but it's both possible and infinitely rewarding. A Path Appears offers practical steps that any of us can take to empower others, and ourselves.

This evil, this concept, it comes from disappointment, from bitterness! Don't you see? Children of Satan! Children of God! Is this the only question you bring to me, is this the only power that obsesses you, so that you must make us gods and devils yourself when the only power that exists is inside ourselves? How could you believe in these old fantastical lies, these myths, these emblems of the supernatural?

Everyone is a potential naked slave to you once you become a trainer.

As a child, I saw this beautiful film, Dracula's Daughter, and it was with Gloria Holden and was a sequel to the original Dracula. It was all about this beautiful daughter of Dracula who was an artist in London, and she felt drinking blood was a curse. It had beautiful, sensitive scenes in it, and that film mesmerized me. It established to me what vampires were?these elegant, tragic, sensitive people. I was really just going with that feeling when writing Interview With the Vampire. I didn't do a lot of research.

You think I live in the past. You don't understand that I actually change with every era, I always have as best I can

But death we are, and death we've always been.

Suffering of sentient beings is like decay; it fertilizes the growth of their souls.

Don't you see? It is a new age. It requires a new evil. And I am that new evil.

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.

We would make our heroes shallow.... We would make them brittle. It is they who must remind us of the true meaning of strength.

Maybe that's what Hell is. You go mad. And all your demons come and get you just as fast as you can think them up.

The library furnished our dreams, helped us shape our ambitions, made up people of books and ideas and grand designs.

Was it fair to say I didn't know the full state of my soul?

To learn and to love, that is what we are here for, any activity which is not grounded in one of these two is a waste of time.

Words are like gems to me... imagine yourself walking through a very shallow stream and picking up beautiful stones that catch your eye... that's what names are like for me.

Everything we do in life, we do with certain expectations.

I WANT to be a saint. I want to save souls by the millions. I want to do good far and wide. I want to fight evil! I want my life-sized statue in every church. I'm talking six feet tall, blond hair, blue eyes-.Wait a second.Do you know who I am?

... what I fear in writing is the safe decision.

I allowed myself to forget how totally I had fallen in love with Lestat's iridescent eyes, that I'd sold my soul for a many-colored and luminescent thing, thinking that a highly reflective surface conveyed the power to walk on water.

Nothing in all the world is so nonsensical and contradictory, save mortals, that is, who live in the grip of the superstitions of the past.

So until we meet again, I am thinking of you always; I love you; I wish you were here...in my arms.

I think any supernatural hero today, whether he's a vampire, werewolf, a resuscitated mummy, whatever he is, is going to have to deal with the fact that scientists are going to want to catch him and study him. His big enemy is not going to be Dr. Van Helsing today, it's going to be the doctor who wants to put him in a lab and get his blood for what it can do to cure disease or grant immortality.

I was typing away while everybody was dropping acid and smoking grass. I was known as my own square.

Hell's Bells ringing, my secret music.

Perhaps this is the only real evil left.

I'm fascinated by almost any mythology that I can get my hands on...

Despair was so familiar to me; it could be banished by the sight of a beautiful mannikin in the window. It could be dispelled by the spectacle of lights surrounding a tower. It could be lifted by the great ghostly shape of St. Patrick's coming into view. And then despair would come again.

Fear is only good when you have a choice in things.