I knew I had been made to lead the party and that I was colder in temperament than the others, but I was not only deeply disturbed, I had lost respect for and trust in the Parents in some vital way. I did not entirely believe them when they said they would consider changing their plan. Their utter indifference to our personal fate was obvious. And not believing some of what they said, I came to question everything they said. I wanted really only one thing and that was to get away from them.
Now a life like that, he figured, could make one tentative and fearful perhaps. Or it could make you remarkably strong, and what people called philosophical – and fiercely independent. Maybe it could make you careless of your own life, indifferent to danger, and determined to live exactly as you pleased.
Armand keeps the island of Manhattan safe for them – Louis, Armand, and two young blood drinkers, Benjamin and Sybelle, and whoever else joins them in their palatial digs on the Upper East Side.
I guess we don’t know what’s real or unreal,′ she had said without meaning to. ‘You stare at anything long enough and suddenly it looks monstrous.
In a real way, eternity is merely the living of one human lifetime after another.
I know this kind of person. I’ve known them all my life. They get the sympathy of others with what passes for insecurity. But what really motivates them is a vanity so immense most of us can not conceive of it. Insecurity is simply a disguise.
Maybe those who rose into the Light simply died, and the universe beyond this world was silent.
I closed my eyes and heard the wind and the sound of water flowing softly, swiftly in the river. It was enough, for one moment. And I knew that it would not endure, that it would fly away from me like something torn out of my arms, and I would fly after it, more desperately lonely than any creature under God, to get it back.
Did they have no inkling of how the advances in lighting had affected the behavior and the minds of people, what it meant for the tiniest hamlet to have its brilliantly lighted drugstores and supermarkets, and for people to wander at eight o’clock of an evening with the same energetic curiosity and eagerness for work and experience that they enjoyed during the sunlight hours?
Seems I’d read somewhere, or heard it in a film, that the Jews believe each life is a universe, and if you take a life, well, then you are destroying a universe. And I thought, Yes, this is true of us, this is why we must love one another, because we are each an entire world.
I’ve always been proud of you, except when you retreat, and give in to your suffering. I haven’t been so proud when you do that. But you always come back. No matter how dreadful the defeat, you come back.
For what secrets, what truths had those monstrous creatures of night to give us? What, of necessity, must be their terrible limits, if indeed we were to find them at all? What can the damned really say to the damned?
And through the gloom I saw that mortal boy watching me, and I smelled the hot aroma of his flesh.
Who else would live in such an unguarded place except a woman for whom the forest was the world, he figured. And what a gentle child of that world she seemed. But oh so foolishly trusting. Way too trusting.
He stood in the doorway, holding the back of his own arms. And I knew what I felt. It was a monstrous intimacy with another being, an intimacy that made even the rapt moments of life seem dim and under control. Never, never in all my existance had I been threateened with an intimacy quite like this.
I adore my Queen and I am here with you. I love you both. I yield to that entirely as well as everything else and even the knowledge I may be punished. And when I am punished, I shall dread it, and suffer it and understand it and accept it. when you accept you will flower in the pain, you will flower in your suffering.
I’ve thought it from time to time myself. Stupidly simple. There has to be something to all this. There has to be! So many missing pieces. The more you consider it, the more atheists begin to sound like religious fanatics. But I think it’s a delusion. It is all process and nothing more.
He wanted to say this was not erotic. But it was erotic, insofar as anything and everything is.
Surely time can take away such love. What a curse if it can’t.” “It can’t.” I said.
But I caught up with him and he didn’t resist when I put my arm around him and we walked on together like that.