We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.
Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.
As long as you look for someone else to validate who you are by seeking their approval, you are setting yourself up for disaster. You have to be whole and complete in yourself. No one can give you that. You have to know who you are – what others say is irrelevant.
Now, this was a pleasant sensation. I bent my head and kissed her throat. Yes, this was nice also. It was nothing as exciting as closing on a victim, but it was nice. I tried to remember what it had been like two hundred years ago when I was the terror of the village girls. Seems some farmer was always at the castle gates, cursing me and swinging his fist at me and telling me that if his daughter was with child by me, I’d have to do something about it! It had all seemed such wonderful fun at the time. And the girls, oh the lovely girls.
Lestat de Lioncourt, Tale of the Body Thief
So yeah we definitely could have some illegitimate de Lioncourts out there…
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, and we will all go home in the end
“Lestat!”
“Louis!” I said, mocking his tone.
I was working on a novel called Born for Atlantis, and I just couldn’t get it to work. I thought, “What if I could somehow combine this with Lestat and the vampires?” And it was like, everything worked. Something happens to me when I write from Lestat’s point of view. There’s no question about it. By the time I was done, it felt inevitable, like it always had been…. It was a rare experience.
Anne Rice, Entertainment Weekly (August 5, 2016)
So, @roselioncourt brings this article to our attention, and I think the relevant quote is above, but there’s a little more about AR’s interest in Atlantis in there.
The relevance is that AR had been working on this Atlantis book and added VC into it later. We’ll see how well that works, but this is an answer to the question, “Atlantis… what?”
[X revised]
I gave the vampire’s fear of sunlight a physiological explanation that had to do with the physiological laws that govern a spirit world or a cosmology. The spirit that has taken them over and made them inhuman is too sensitive to sunlight. It can’t thrive in sunlight — it’s simply paralyzed by sunlight, and weakened — and it can’t enliven their flesh. Therefore, the flesh starts to burn, because the flesh is dead anyway. The dark gift of immortality has different effects on different people. That they respond in different ways. Some people are emboldened, and some people are weakened. Some people are crippled by it, and destroyed by it. Other people are made into monsters by it. But the fundamental thing that happens with Louis is that it doesn’t change him. He is a guilt-ridden adult, living in grief over his dead brother, and he becomes a guilt-ridden vampire, living in grief over the fact that he has to take life in order to live. Perhaps it’s a lesson to Lestat that the basic personality doesn’t always change.
Anne Rice (via jardinsalvaje)
[X]
The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.
When it’s good, there’s sort of nothing like it. When you’re in the moment, and the audience is with you, and you’re telling that story, and it’s alive, and it’s happening… and it feels like it’s never happened before, there’s nothing better. It’s just like flying.
When it’s bad, it’s awful.
I-want-my-IWTV 