Lestat’s Words of Wisdom

Lux Ferre 7 November 2012

Lestat's words of wisdom

**Interview With the Vampire**
“I’d like to meet the devil some night. I’d chase him from here to the wilds of the Pacific. I am the devil.”
“Evil is a point of view. God kills, indiscriminately, and so shall we. He takes the richest and the poorest, as so shall we, for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves. Dark angels not confined to the stinking limits of hell but wandering his earth and all it’s kingdoms.”

**The Vampire Lestat**
“It is a new age. It requires a new evil. And I am that new evil. I am the vampire for these times.”
“I want to affect things! To make something happen!”
“In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art–the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard’s canvases–beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.”
“We are the things that others fear.”
“Don’t be a fool for the devil, darling!…Unless he treats you a damn sight better than the Almighty!”
“I never lie…Atleast not to those I don’t love.”
“I don’t believe in anything. And that makes me stronger than you think.”
“Try to see the evil that I am. I stalk the world in mortal dress–the worst of fiends, the monster who looks exactly like everyone else.”
“Speak to me of the Dark Gifts- I use them. I’m Gentleman Death in silk and lace, come to put out the candles. The canker in the heart of the rose.”
“I realized aloud in the midst of saying it that even when we die we probably don’t find out the question as to why we were ever alive. Even the avowed atheist probably thinks that in death he’ll get some answer. I mean God will be there, or there won’t be anything at all.”

**The Queen of the Damned**
“There are too many other inexplicable things around us–horrors, threats, mysteries that draw you in and then inevitably disenchant you. Back to the predictable and humdrum. The prince is never going to come, everybody knows that; and maybe Sleeping Beauty’s dead.”
“To be this happy is to be miserable, to feel this much satisfaction is to burn.”
“It’s an awful truth that suffering can deepen us, give a greater luster to our colours, a richer resonance to our words. That is, if it doesn’t destroy us, if it doesn’t burn away the optimism and the spirit, the capacity for visions, and the respect for simple yet indispensable things.”
“Finally those you love are simply…those you love.”
“I can’t help being a gorgeous fiend. It’s just the card I drew.”
“We live in a world of accidents finally, in which only aesthetic principles have a consistency of which we can be sure. Right and wrong we will struggle with forever, striving to create and maintain an ethical balance; but the shimmer of summer rain under the street lamps or the great flashing glare of artillery against a night sky–such brutal beauty is beyond dispute.”
“I’ve always been my own teacher, and I must confess I’ve always been my favourite pupil as well.”
“I’m a perfect devil. Tell me how bad I am. It makes me feel so good!”
“It was haunted. But real hauntings have nothing to do with ghosts finally; they have to do with the menace of memory…”
“None of us really changes over time; we only become more fully what we are.”
“I never really envision the finish of anything that I start. It’s risk that fascinates, the moment of infinite possibility. It lures me through eternity when all other charms fail.”

**The Tale of the Body Thief**
“So we reach into the raging chaos and we pluck some small glittering thing, and we cling to it, and tell ourselves it has meaning, and that the world is good, and we are not evil.”
“Sometimes I become spellbound in the middle of Wal-Mart.”
“My greatest sin has always been that I have a wonderful time being myself.”
“Rules, rules, rules. They always wind up talking about rules. And I love to break the rules the way mortals like to smash their crystal glasses after a toast together against the bricks of a fireplace.”
“And my dark soul is happy once again, because it does not know how to be anything else for very long, and because the pain is a deep dark sea in which I would drown if I did not sail my little craft steadily over the surface, steadily towards a sun which will never rise.”
“Reason told me it was a little too early to plot anything. Besides, I have never had a deep interest in revenge. Revenge is the concern of those who are at some point beaten. I am not beaten, I told myself. No, not beaten. And victory is far more interesting to contemplate than revenge.”

**Memnoch the Devil**
“I don’t like myself, you know. I love myself, of course. I’m devoted to myself till my dying day. But I don’t like myself.”
“Despair was so familiar to me; it could be banished by the sight of a beautiful mannikin in the window. It could be dispelled by the spectacle of lights surrounding a tower. It could be lifted by the great ghostly shape of Saint Patrick’s coming into view. And then despair would come again.”

**IWTV – The Movie**
“Louis, Louis; still whining Louis. Have you heard enough? I’ve had to listen to that for centuries.”

Categories: Lestathenaeum