She found herself staring at a tintype, a late-nineteenth-century photograph.
Everything is coming to an end, I thought. But what does that mean? Why do I say things to myself when I don’t even know what they mean?
The belief in a special destiny is one of the most rampant and harmful delusions on earth.
Do it for a world that will never knew you or thank you, but a world that you can now truly save.
Nothing vanishes quite like pain – when pain does vanish, that is. Because most of the time pain never does.
Ah, so much to ponder. But not now. Now was the time for the conjugal blessing of this new abode.
I want to be read. I want to be valued. That is perhaps the only shot at immortality a human being can have.
I’ve loved you more than any being in all the world whom I’ve ever loved.
Everything that is conscious, aware of itself, has a soul.
And you have never given me your love.
Is that the proof, Almighty God, that you are not there, that your saints could be such petty demons?
And your eyes pass over me as if I don’t exist.
I hate you as much as I have ever loved you.
But the old Italian commedia that I loved – Pantaloon, Harlequin, Scaramouche, and the rest – lived on as they always had, with tightrope walkers, acrobats, jugglers, and puppeteers, in the platform spectacles at the St.-Germain and the St.-Laurent fairs.
Yet their whispers slithered around me. And those scents, ah, not a one was like another. And as clearly as if spoken aloud it came, the summons from mortals here and there, sensing what I was, and the lust.
And I knew my vision of the garden of savage beauty had been a true vision. There was meaning in the world, yes, and laws, and inevitability, but they had only to do with the aesthetic. And in this Savage Garden, these innocent ones belonged in the vampire’s arms. A thousand other things can be said about the world, but only aesthetic principles can be verified, and these things alone remain the same.
Don’t get overly optimistic about death,” I said. “I’m warning you. My views are changing. The atheism and nihilism of my earlier years now seems shallow, and even a bit cocky.
I saw my life as if I stood apart from it, the vanity, the self-serving, the constant fleeing from one petty annoyance after another, the lip service to God and the Virgin and a host of saints whose names filled my prayer books, none of whom made the slightest difference in a narrow, materialistic, and selfish existence. I saw my real gods... the gods of most men. Food, drink, and security in conformity.
Old truths and ancient magic, revolution and invention, all conspire to distract us from the passion that in one way or another defeats us all. And weary finally of this complexity, we dream of that long-ago time when we sat upon our mother’s knee and each kiss was the perfect consummation of desire. What can we do but reach for the embrace that must now contain both Heaven and Hell: our doom again and again and again. – Lestat in The Vampire Lestat.
She was no longer shaken. If she remembered her screams in the fire she did not care to dwell on them. If she remembered that, before the fire, she had wept real tears in my arms, it made no change in her; she was, as always in the past, a person of little indecision, a person for who habitual quiet did not mean anxiety of regret.
A great fleecy cloud had released the moon, and high above us loomed the dark outline of the tower. One long window showed the pale sky beyond it.