I wasn’t part of the world that cringed at such things. And with a smile, I realized that I was of that dark ilk that makes others cringe. Slowly and with great pleasure, I laughed.
I picked up the corpse and dragged it down and down the winding steps of the tower, into the stinking dungeon, and threw it to rot with the rest there.
We truly are all one tribe,” said the iron-haired ghost softly. “Human, vampire, spirit, ghost – we’re all sentient creatures bound to this planet. Why can’t we work together in the face of something like this?
I’m too much the slave of my own obsessions and fascination.
Finally I closed my eyes and opened them again, and I smiled very gently at the creature.
The horror was this: the others.
The problem with retiring to a desert place was that Daniel would hate it. And keeping Daniel happy was the second rule of his life, as his own sense of well-being, his own capacity to open his eyes each evening with some desire to actually rise from the dead and celebrate the gift of life, was connected to and sustained by making Daniel happy.
I picture heaven as a vast library, with unlimited volumes to read. And paintings and statues to examine.
I tell you these massacres have to come. They have to. There’s bad dudes selling the Blood. Can you believe? Selling the Blood. Least they were. I expect they’re played out too and running for their lives now like everybody else.
Davis was a beautiful black vampire, and Killer had loved him.
Stella seems the most carefree, the most flamboyant, the most daring, and the only Mayfair Witch ever bent entirely upon “having fun.
And I’ll know people like you,′ I went on, ’people who have thoughts in their heads and quick tongues with which to voice them, and we’ll sit in cafes and we’ll drink together and we’ll clash with each other violently in words, and we’ll talk for the rest of our lives in devine excitement.
Lestat might be the hero of the Vampire Chronicles, but this one, Louis, was the tragic heart. Yet he seemed at long last to have achieved a kind of peace with the ghastly realities of his existence and the existence of all those around him who outranked him in power but not necessarily in insight or wisdom.
Beside him walked a vampire nearly as old as Gregory, and indeed this one was none other than Seth, the son of the ancient Mother.
Maybe I was not the exotic outcast that I imagined, but merely the dim magnification of every human soul.
Nothing was anything until someone defined it. Nothing was inevitable. Nothing was inviolate. Everything existed, perhaps, by the act of faith, and we were always in the midst of creating our world, complete with the trappings of tradition that was nothing more than an invention like all the rest.
I’d like to meet the devil some night,’ he said once with a malignant smile. ‘I’d chase him from here to the wilds of the Pacific. I am the devil.
Lord, set my heart afire with faith, because I am losing faith. Lord, touch my heart, and set it afire.
First time my master’s in English literature ever proved useful.
Of course we cannot know what will happen as the old religion thoroughly dies out. Christianity rose on the ashes of paganism, only to carry forth the old worship in new form. Maybe a new religion will rise now. Maybe without it, man will crumble in cynicism and selfishness because he really needs his gods.