"Without memory there can be no insight. Without love, there can be no appreciation."

"You have a light in you that's almost blinding. But in me there's only darkness. Sometimes I think it's like the darkness that infected you that night in the inn when you began to cry and to tremble. You were so helpless, so unprepared for it. I try to keep the darkness from you because I need your light. I need it desperately, but you don't need the darkness."

"Life is a tragedy, one way or another. What is certain is that you die."

"The greatest create of power you have on earth, whether you are an angel, a spirit, a man or woman or child is to help others."

"I want to love all the children of God - Christian, Jew, Moslem, Hindu, Buddhist - everyone. I want to love gay Christians and straight Christians."

"Despair is so familiar to me; it could be banished by the sight of a beautiful mannekin in the window. It could be dispelled by the lights surrounding a tower. It would be lifted by the great ghostly shape of St. Patrick's coming into view. And then despair would come again. Meaningless, I almost said, aloud."

"The Maker offers us creation itself as proof of his greatness."

"Good was above all kind; it was to be gentle. It was to waste nothing. It was to paint, to read, to study, to listen."

"The only pain in pleasure is the pleasure of the pain."

"Sometimes it seems that light can transform anything! That it is an undeniable and irreducible metaphor for grace. But do the people of the ranchitos know this? Is it for beauty that they do it? Or do they merely want a comfortable illumination in their little shacks?It doesn't matter.We can't stop ourselves from making beauty. We can't stop the world."

"I wish we had more visible Christian and Catholic leaders who talked about love."

"First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success."

"Who could trust language?"

"As if the night had said to me, 'You are the night and the night alone understands you and enfolds you in its arms' One with the shadows. Without nightmare. An inexplicable peace."

"Evil is a point of view ... God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately ... for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like Him as ourselves.God kills indiscriminately and so shall we. For no creatures under God are as we are none so like him as ourselves."

"I can't get very far away from Christianity, I can't get very far away from the angels and the saints. I work them in always, in some way."

"Would that death were like this. Would that one would sleep and sleep and sleep forever."

"A summer rain had left the night clean and sparkling with drops of water. I leaned against the end pillar of the gallery, my head touching the soft tendrils of a jasmine which grew there in a constant battle with a wisteria, and I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another."

"In his refusal to believe in anything supernatural or inherently evil, he was as unrealistic as an old voodoo queen who sees spirits everywhere."

"People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don't know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult."

"My Lasher is powerful beyond yourdreams of a daimon, and he has learnt much.''Learned,' I repeated in amazement. 'How learned, Deborah, for he is merely a spirit, and they areforever foolish and therein lies the danger, that in granting our wishes they do not understand thecomplexity of them, and thereby prove our undoing. There are a thousand tales that prove it. Has this nothappened? How so do you say learned?"

"The finest thing under the sun and moon is the human soul. I marvel at the small miracles of kindness that pass between humans, I marvel at the growth of conscience, at the persistence of reason in the face of all superstition or despair. I marvel at human endurance."

"Well, I am no village cunning woman, no frightened merry-begot, but a woman born to riches, andeducated from the time I can remember, and given all that I could possibly desire. And now in mytwenty-second year, already a mother and soon perhaps to be a widow, I rule in this place. I ruledbefore my mother gave to me all her secrets, and her great familiar, Lasher, and I mean to study thisthing, and make use of it, and allow it to enhance my considerable strength."

"The spirit who inhabits her animates us all. Destroy the host, you destroy the power. The young die first; the old wither slowly; the eldest perhaps would go last. But she is the Queen of the Damned, and the Damned can't live without her."

"Go where the pain is, go where the pleasure is."

"The truth is laughter always sounds more perfect than weeping. Laughter flows in a violent riff and is effortlessly melodic. Weeping is often fought choked half strangled or surrendered to with humiliation."

"You are the son of the Lord God! She said. That's why you can kill and bring back to life, that's why you can heal a blind man as Joseph saw you do, that's why you can pray for snow and there will be snow, that's why you can dispute with your uncle Cleopas when he forgets you're a boy, that's why you make sparrows from clay and bring them to life. Keep your power inside you. Guard it until your Father in Heaven shows you the time to use it. If he's made you a child, then he's made you a child to grow in wisdom as well as in everything else."

"In the story of the prince and the frog, there's always a frog. This story ... it has no frog."

"There may be writing groups where people meet but it's occasional. You really do it all at your own computer or your own typewriter by yourself."

"I thought The Shining was just absolutely wonderful. Stephen King reaches all kinds of people. In the beginning he was just dismissed out of hand, which was terrible."

"Come on, say it again. I'm a perfect devil. Tell me how bad I am. It makes me feel so good!"

"I read The Old Curiosity Shop before I began Blackwood Farm. I was amazed at the utter madness in that book."

"Your body's dying...pay no attention."

"You're a mystery the way a sacrament is a mystery."

"She had learnt a painful lesson, she thought " that as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow."

"What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it's that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness ofnormality that is just a myth."

"A large American automobile came crawling close to us, and we could hear from behind its thick windows the deep bass of the radio, and the nasty words of a hateful song.It seemed like so much of modern music, a din to drive human beings mad."

"We have to become saints. We have to become like Christ. Anything less is simply not enough."

"My own funeral, I'd like to be laid out in a coffin in my own house. I would like my coffin to be put in the double parlor, and I would like all the flowers to be white."

"What is fear after all? It is indecision. You seek some way to resist, escape. There is none."

"Because," she said, "that is what men would call it. They invented Satan, didn't they? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which men want to live."

"As the Roman Empire came to its close, all the old gods of the pagan world were seen as demons by the Christians who rose. It was useless to tell them as the centuries passed that their Christ was but another God of the Wood, dying and rising, as Dionysus or Osiris had done before him, and that the Virgin Mary was in fact the Good Mother again enshrined. Theirs was a new age of belief and conviction, and in it we became devils, detached from what they believed, as old knowledge was forgotten or misunderstood."

"We all suffer under a curse, the curse that we know more than we can endure, and there is nothing, absolutely nothing we can do about the force and the lure of this knowledge."

"I was at a loss suddenly; but conscious all the while of how Armand listened; that he listened in the way that we dream of others listening, his face seeming to reflect on every thing said. He did not start forward to seize on my slightest pause, to assert an understanding of something before the thought was finished, or to argue with a swift, irresistible impulse -- the things which often make dialogue impossible.And after a long interval he said, 'I want you. I want you more than anything in the world."

"Do you know what I think about crying? I think some people have to learn to do it. But once you learn, once you know how to really cry, there's nothing quite like it. I feel sorry for those who don't know the trick. It's like whistling or singing."

"I saw my real gods . . the gods of most men. Food, drink, and security in conformity."

"I'm fascinated by almost any mythology that I can get my hands on."

"Lestat: You're very anxious to be out of these rooms, aren't you? Why don't we simply get into bed together? I don't understand.David: You're serious?Lestat: Of courseDavid: You do realize, that this is an absolutely magnificent body, don't you? I mean you aren't insensible to the fact that you've been deposited in a...a most impressive piece of young male flesh.Lestat: I looked it over well before the switch, remember? Why is it you don't want to..David: You've been with a woman, haven't you?Lestat: I wish you hadn't read my mind. It's rude. Besides, what does that matter to you?David: A woman you loved.Lestat: I have always loved both men and women.David: That's a slightly different use of the word 'love."

"Maybe we do go home, finally."

"I had to have him, had to. Just the way I had to have everything I wanted; or had to do everything I'd ever wanted to do."