If we wanted to survive, if we wanted to inherit the millennia as Thorne and Cyril, and Teskhamen and Chrysanthe had inherited them, as Avicus and Zenobia had inherited them, as Marius and Pandora and Flavius had inherited them, and as Rhoshamandes and Sevraine had inherited them – and as Seth and Gregory, now the very oldest among us, had inherited them – then we had to meet the future with respect as well as courage and count fear and selfishness to be small things.
But what endures is what has always mattered: love – that we love one another as surely as we are alive. And if there is any hope for us to ever really be good – that hope will be realized through love.
And we are this, this only, this ecstasy that flesh can give to flesh.
Some of us are infinitely better at being miserable than happy,” he said gently. “We’re good at it, and proud of it, and we get better and better at it, and we simply don’t know what it means to be happy.
But she was radiant, and she was mine; she was as she’d always been, and I told her so silently with all my power, that she was lovely as my earliest memory of her when she had had her old fancy clothes still, and she would dress up so carefully and carry me on her lap in the carriage to church.
If there is any sea as blue as the Caribbean I have never beheld it, and when it is seen at twilight, it is most spectacular, but then you will hear more of this later, for I have had much time to contemplate the color of this sea. On.
The moon that rose over New Orleans then still rises. As.
In fiction if nowhere else, I must have a little meaning, a little coherence, or I will go mad.
But then I do not remember everything, as I once thought I did. There is something in us, even us, that will not allow for that, something that pushes the memory of suffering that is unbearable slowly away.
But vampires feel cold as acutely as humans, and the blood of the kill is often the rich, sensual alleviation of that cold. But.
It had been the golden time of evening when the sun is gone and everything gives back the light it has absorbed all day long.
Do you think that angels are detached?” asked.
I wrestled as well with my passion for life, my lust for pleasure, for music, and beauty, and comfort and sensuality, and the inexplicable joys of art – and the baffling majesty of loving another so much that all the world, it seemed, depended on that love.
Something happens to your senses when you look on Louis. Behold Louis...
I’d demeaned and insulted those who didn’t know how to be happy. Yes, I was determined to be happy. And I fought furiously for ways to be happy.
The British, they always have information. They drag their damned Indian tea and their London Times with them wherever they go.
Ultimately they will all disappoint you.
I reach now for a victim who is not easy for me to overcome: my own past. Perhaps this victim will flee from me with a speed that equals my own. Whatever, I seek now a victim that I have never faced. And there is the thrill of the hunt in it, what the modern world calls investigation.
Divesting oneself so totally of the customary feelings of alienation and distrust that the subsequent acceptance was intellectually orgasmic.
Flavius has never put a single question to us as to what we were. In his mind, I found, devotion and acceptance far superseded curiosity or fear.