Quotes

Louis: 1791 was the year it happened. I was 24, younger than you are now. But times were different then, I was a man at that age: the master of a large plantation just south of New Orleans. I had lost my wife in childbirth, and she and the infant had been buried less than half a year. I would have been happy to join them. I couldn't bear the pain of their loss. I longed to be released from it. I wanted to lose it all... my wealth, my estate, my sanity. Most of all, I longed for death. I know that now. I invited it. A release from the pain of living. My invitation was open to anyone. To the whore at my side. To the pimp that followed. But it was a vampire that accepted it.

Yvette: Ummm... Monsieur Louis. You don't want any supper no?

Louis: No, ma chère.

Yvette: We're worried about you, master. Why is it that you don't go riding in the field? And how long since you've been to the slave quarter? Everywhere there is death. Are you still our master at all?

Louis: That will be all, Yvette!

Yvette: I will not go unless you listen to me! You must, you must send away this friend of yours. The slaves they are all frightened of him... and they are frightened of you.

[touches Louis's hand]

Louis: I'm frightened of myself.

[Indulges in close contact with Yvette. Then begins to bite her wrist. She starts to scream out. For a moment he is too caught up in biting her. She cries out louder and he snaps into reality. He puts his hand over her mouth, wrestles her to the floor and kills her]

Louis: [Louis walks outside carrying Yvette's lifeless body. He speaks to the slaves who have come to see what all the screaming was about] Hear me now! This place is cursed, damned, and yes your master is the devil! Get out while you can! You are all free men! You hear me?

[Louis gives Yvette to a nearby slave and takes hold of a torch]

Louis: Run, flee, save yourselves!

[waves torch wildly at slaves to make them leave and then goes inside to set house on fire]

Louis: For 30 years I had avoided that place. Yet I found my way back there with hardly an upward glance.

Lestat: No one could resist me, not even you, Louis.

Louis: I tried.

Lestat: [smiling] And the more you tried, the more I wanted you.

Louis: Do you think I would let them harm you.

Claudia: No you would not Louis, danger holds you to me.

Louis: Love holds you to me.

Louis: You see that old woman? That will never happen to you. You will never grow old, and you will never die.

Claudia: And it means something else too, doesn't it? I shall never ever grow up.

Lestat: You are a vampire who never knew what life was until it ran out in a big gush over your lips.

Louis: Where are we?

Lestat: Where do you think, my idiot friend? We're in a nice, filthy cemetery. Does this make you happy? Is this fitting, proper enough?

Louis: We belong in hell.

Lestat: And what if there is no hell, or they don't want us there? Ever think of that?

Louis: But there was a hell, and no matter where we moved to, I was in it.

Louis: Claudia, don't!

Claudia: [Beginning to cut her hair] Why not? Can't I change, like everybody else?

Santiago: Suppose death had a heart to love and to release you, to whom would he turn this passion, would you chose a person from the crowd there. A person to suffer as you suffer.

Lestat: Mon dieu, what melancholy nonsense. I swear you grow more like Louis each day. Soon you'll be eating rats!

Claudia: Rats? When did you eat rats Louis?

Louis: It was a long, long time ago. Before you were born, and I don't recommend them.

Claudia: Madeleine, Louis is shy.

Madeleine: Drink.

Claudia: Do it, Louis, because I cannot, I haven't the strength. You saw to that when you made me.

Louis: You haven't the vaguest conception under God what you ask.

Madeleine: Au contraire, Monsieur, I have.

Claudia: You have found your new companion, Louis, You will make me mine.

Louis: That morning I was not yet a vampire, and I saw my last sunrise. I remember it completely, and yet I can't recall any sunrise before it. I watched the whole magnificence of the dawn for the last time as if it were the first. And then I said farewell to sunlight, and set out to become what I became.

Claudia: Goodnight sweet prince, may flights of devils wing you to your rest.

Claudia: Do you know what his soul said to me, without saying a word? 'Let him go', he said 'Let him go'.

Louis: Vampires pretending to be humans, pretending to be vampires.

Claudia: How avant-garde.

Armand: You are beautiful my friend. Lestat must have wept when he made you.

Louis: Lestat? You knew Lestat?

Armand: Knew him well enough not to mourn his passing

Claudia: Which one of you did it? One of you did it! Which on of you made me the way I am?

Lestat: What you are? A vampire gone insane that pollutes its own bed?

Claudia: And if I cut my hair again?

Lestat: It will grow back again.

Claudia: But it wasn't always so. I had a mother once, and Louis, he had a wife. He was mortal the same as she and so was I.

Louis: Claudia!

Claudia: You made us what we are, didn't you?

Lestat: Stop her, Louis.

Claudia: Did you do it to me?

[slashes Lestat's face, and it heals immediately]

Claudia: How did you do it?

Lestat: Why should I tell you? It's in my power.

Claudia: Why yours alone? Tell me how it was done.

Lestat: Be glad I made you what you are. You'd be dead now if I hadn't, just like that damned corpse. Now, get rid of it!

Claudia: You get rid of it.

Daniel Molloy: What did you see?

Louis: No words can describe it. May as well ask Heaven what it sees; no human can know.

Lestat: I'm going to give you the choice I never had.

Claudia: It's time we were on our way. I'm hungry, and the city awaits.

Daniel Molloy: So, what do you do?

Louis: I'm a vampire.

Daniel Molloy: Hmm. That's something I've never heard before. You mean this literally, I take it?

Louis: Absolutely. I was waiting for you in that alleyway: watching you watching me. And then you began to speak.

Daniel Molloy: What a lucky break for me.

Louis: Perhaps lucky for the both of us.

Daniel Molloy: You said you were waiting for me. What were you going to do? Kill me, drink my blood, all that stuff?

Louis: Yes, but you needn't be concerned with that now.

Daniel Molloy: You really believe this, don't you, that you're a vampire?

Louis: We can't begin this way. Let me turn on the light.

Daniel Molloy: I thought vampires didn't like the light.

Louis: We love it. I only wanted to prepare you.

Lestat: Merciful death. How you love your precious guilt.

Lestat: It's your coffin, my love. Enjoy it. Most of us never get to know what it feels like.

Louis: Why do you do this?

Lestat: I like to do it. I enjoy it. Take your aesthete's; taste purer things; kill them swiftly, if you will, but do it. For do not doubt: you are a killer, Louis.

Lestat: I am afraid, madam, my days are sacrosanct.

[to Malloy]

Lestat: I assume I need no introduction.

Louis: Bear me no ill will my love we are now even.

Claudia: What do you mean?

Louis: What died in that room was not that woman. What has died is the last breath in me that was human.

Claudia: Yes, Father. At last we are even.

Lestat: Come to New Orleans then. The Paris Opera's in town. We can try some French cuisine.

Louis: Forgive me if I have a lingering respect for mortal life.

Louis: But the world was a tomb to me, a graveyard of broken statues, and each of those statues resembled her face.

Lestat: Listen Louis. There's life in these old hands still. Not quite Furioso. Moderato? Cantabile, perhaps.

Claudia: How can it be?

Lestat: Ask the alligator. His blood helped. Then on a diet of the blood of snakes, toads, and all the putrid life of the Mississippi. Slowly, Lestat became something like himself again. Claudia... You've been a very, very, naughty little girl.

[watching a nude prostitute]

Lestat: Now that is pure Creole. Trust Claudia to have found her. What, don't you want her?

Claudia: I want to be her.

Lestat: Whining coward of a vampire that prowls the night killing rats and poodles; you could have finished us both.

Louis: You've condemned me to Hell.

Lestat: I don't know any Hell.

Louis: The statue seemed to move, but didn't. The world had changed, yet stayed the same. I was a newborn vampire weeping at the beauty of the night.

Louis: They know about us. They watch us dine on empty plates and drink from empty glasses.

Louis: Thirty years had passed, yet her body remained that of an eternal child. Her eyes alone told the story of her age, staring out from under her doll-like curls, with a questioning that will one day need an answer.

Louis: Then out of curiosity, boredom, who knows what, I left the old world and came back to my America. And there, a mechanical wonder allowed me to see the sun rise for the first time in two hundred years. And what sunrises, seen as the human eye could never see them: silver at first, then, as the years progressed, in tones of purple, red, and my long lost blue.

Louis: So it was, when I'd given up the search for vampires, that a vampire found me.

Lestat: Have you said your good-byes to the light?

[bites Louis]

Lestat: I've drained you to the point of death. If I leave you here, you die. Or you can be young always, my friend, as we are now, but you must tell me: will you come or no?

Armand: I know nothing of God, or the Devil. I have never seen a vision nor learned a secret that will damn or save my soul. And as far as I know, after four hundred years, I am the oldest living vampire in the world.

Louis: My God, I've failed again.

Lestat: [after Claudia kills the piano teacher] Claudia, what have we told you?

Claudia: Never in the house.

Santiago: Just as this flesh is pink now, soon it will turn gray and wrinkled with age.

Mortal Woman on Stage: [weeping] Let me live. I don't care!

Santiago: Then why should you care if you die now?

Lestat: There's nothing in the world now that doesn't hold some sort of...

Louis: Fascination.

Lestat: Yes. I'm bored of this prattle.

Louis: But if we can live without taking human life? It's possible.

Lestat: Anything's possible. Just try it for a week. Come to New Orleans. Let me show you some real sport.

Daniel Molloy: What about crucifixes?

Louis: Crucifixes?

Daniel Molloy: Yes, can you look at them?

Louis: Actually I am quite fond of looking at crucifixes.

Daniel Molloy: What about the old stake through the heart?

Louis: Nonsense

Daniel Molloy: Coffins? What about coffins?

Louis: Coffins. Coffins, I'm afraid, are a necessity.

[Claudia has just killed her seamstress]

Lestat: Claudia! Claudia! Now, who are we going to get to finish your dress? These impracticalities, cherie! Remember: never in the home!

Santiago: Do you know what it means to be loved by Death?

Santiago: To become our bride?

Lestat: Enough! Enough! Stop!

Claudia: I want some more.