Falling Into That Anne Rice Universe
“We’re frightened of what makes us different.” – Anne Rice
Anne Rice passed away on December 11th. She created Interview with the Vampire and the series of books that followed it, all of which I consumed ravenously as she awakened in me a new perspective on the world. To be swept up in a world of androgynous vampires where humans are definitely lower on the food chain, written from the perspective of a powerful woman, shook up the very different world of Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum novels I’d been hooked on at the time.
Anne Rice turned the world upside down with her vampire series. She brought us face-to-face with what makes us different and forced us to confront it in captivating stories, and influenced a generation of writers who followed her to dive deeper in their own work. Here are five more quotes that stir and bolster and inspire:
“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
“To write something you have to risk making a fool of yourself.”
“You do have a story inside you; it lies articulate and waiting to be written — behind your silence and your suffering.”
“And books, they offer one hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.” – from Blackwood Farm
“And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would die tomorrow or the day after or eventually… it doesn’t matter. Because if God does not exist, then life… every second of it… Is all we have.” – from Interview with the Vampire