He had not perished. That might be his only significant accomplishment. He had survived. Yes, he’d been defeated, more than once. But fortune had refused to release him. And he was here now, whole, and quietly accepting of the fact though he honestly did not know why.
I dream the dreams of the young,’ he said. ‘And they are always dreams of being older, and richer, and wiser, and stronger, don’t you think?
Be it further understood that all mortals who would receive the Dark Gifts should be beautiful in person so that the insult to God might be greater when the Dark Trick is done. Three.
And how is evil achieved?” He asked. “How does one fall from grace and become in one instant as evil as the mob tribunal of the revolution or the most cruel of the Roman emperors? Does one merely have to miss mass on Sunday or bite down on the communion host? Or steal a loaf of bread... or sleep with a neighbor’s wife.
The silent ebb and flow of life without change seemed deadly to me.
The greatest creative power you have on earth... is to help others. To ease pain and give joy are your finest powers. Kindness is a human miracle.
Never make a blood drinker of a greater age, said Eudoxia. For a greater mortal age can only lead to misery later on from habits learned in mortal life.
Grief, she thought. It’s a strange and a misunderstood emotion.
The blowing mist, filled with the light of the moon, was seeking to swallow the lamps of the heavens.
Maybe I’ll obey the rules. Some of them, anyway, who knows? What are you going to do if I don’t, by the way, and haven’t I asked you this before?
Alas, my being the James Bond of vampires isn’t the whole issue. Vanity must wait.
We are witnesses with both too much and too little feeling.
It’s blunders, people making blunders, whether it’s raiding a village and killing all the inhabitants, or killing a child in a fit of rage. Mistakes. Everything is simply a matter of mistakes.
But complex and fanciful religions have been founded upon such simple and deceptive experiences, giving mythical names to vague entities, and creating an enormous vehicle for compounded superstitious belief. Have not these religions been more evil than good?
Do you know what it means to be loved by Death?
Delicately he put the tiny needle to its task upon the revolving record. A thin and rasping Vienna waltz poured forth from the metal horn. I laughed to see it, this sweet invention, set before them like an offering. Was the waltz like incense rising in the air? But.
Pure evil has no real place. And that means, doesn’t it, that I have no place. Except, perhaps, in the art that repudiates evil – the vampire comics, the horror novels, the old gothic tales – or in the roaring chants of the rock stars who dramatize the battles against evil that each mortal fights within himself.
When you love coffee you abandon everything to that love.
In time,” he said with a sigh, “I found a woman in a lowly hut, a cunning woman, a healer, such a thing as men call a witch and a hag. Hesketh was her name. She was a prisoner of hideousness as was I.
Poetry is truth... It is the highest truth, and eloquence is its attribute.