The typical conservative Roman was far too practical for that. If you didn’t know by age five that the gods were made-up creatures and the myths invented stories, then you were a fool.
Your evil is that you cannot be evil. And I shall suffer for it no longer!
An actor said at one point that evil was a necessity. It was food for genius.
After all, these were blood drinkers, beings who spoke gently, liked poetry, and yet killed mortals all the time.
It was not to relive the old pain that she had returned, it was to know again, for a little while, the joy that had gone before.
I watched him rise from the coffin, with slow, elegant gestures; our gestures, for we are the only beings who routinely rise from coffins.
Ah, but prophecies have a way of fulfilling themselves,′ Khayman said. ‘That’s the magic of it. We all understood it in ancient times. The power of charms is the power of the will; you might say that we were all geniuses of psychology in those dark days, that we could be slain by the power of another’s designs. And the dreams, Marius, the dreams are but a part of the great design.
I don’t really believe I am a hero to the world. But I long ago decided that I must live as if I were a hero – that I must pass through all the difficulties which confront me, because they are only my inevitable circles of fire.
There was never a mention, never a declaration or a decision. But the long hours of talking stopped. No more reading aloud, or music, or films. And after that there was simple physical affection, the two walking arm in arm, or Maharet at her reading with Mekare sitting motionless on a bench nearby.
Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts.
You are on the threshold of a great journey, and you must begin to think in terms of what you can do as a powerful spiritual and biological being. Stop with the self-loathing. Stop with imagery of ‘the damned’ this and ‘the damned’ that! We are not damned. We never were.
Can you picture it, this splendid domesticity, dim lamps, the vampire father singing to the vampire daughter? Only the doll had a human face, only the doll.
Maybe we do go home, finally.
Tonio Treschi was that half man, that less than man that arouses the contempt of every whole man who looks upon it. Tonio Treschi was that thing which women cannot leave alone and men find infinitely disturbing, frightening, pathetic, the butt of jokes and endless bullying, the necessary evil of the church choirs and the opera stage which is, outside that artifice and grace and soaring music, very simply monstrous.
After all, it is a lot of trouble to hate people, isn’t it? And a lot of trouble to be angry, and a lot of trouble to bother with such abstract notions as guilt or revenge.
I understand the very definition of “hate” when I think of you.
So that’s how we go on acting dramas in our theater of the mind even when we don’t believe anymore in the audience or the director or the play.
You don’t have to take upon yourself the burden of murder or madness to be free of this place. Surly there must be other ways.
Love is the only defense we ever have against the cold meaninglessness around us.
He thought of the Englishman at the bar in the lobby again. That’s what had brought it all back – the Englishman remarking to the bartender that he’d just come from New Orleans, and that certainly was a haunted city.