50 Best Lestat de Lioncourt Quotes

Claudia: Let me go, Lestat.
Lestat: In Louis' hour of need? I'm afraid I can't allow that. He's very fragile right now. Worse than the last time you abandoned him, when you filled your head with knowledge and hitched a ride on a motorbike.

Lestat: How was college? Magna cum? Summa cum? Phi Beta Kappa?
Claudia: I've read a lot of books. Started with Persia and Babylon, the old gods who longed for blood. A lot of it was popcorn, but a few old tomes. A Romanian tract on 'vampirs.' A strange, old Hungarian text, 'Masticatione Mortuorum,' the 'chewing dead.' I plan to leave for that part of the world as soon as I can.
Lestat: So, a quick stop home to do laundry before you fuck off for good.

[Claudia returns home after seven years]
Lestat: The prodigal daughter.
Claudia: I've come to apologize. I put you both in a bad spot. I wasn't right in my head. I am now.
Lestat: Apology not accepted.

Lestat: Come to me.

Louis: You're angry.
Lestat: I'm pondering.
Louis: Pondering what?
Lestat: Your night had nothing to do with ridding the world of criminals or finding some morality to buoy your existence. You're ashamed of what we are.
Louis: Maybe I'm just pondering what I am.
Lestat: For the infinitesimal time, you're a vampire.

Lestat: [singing] Oh, joy, oh, boy. Where do we go from here...
Louis: Not funny.
Lestat: What can I say? I'm a lot. I'm not perfect.
Louis: [scoffs] I knew it. I knew you were there.
Lestat: Yes.
Louis: You jealous?
Lestat: Yes. I don't like sharing.
Louis: What about Antoinette?
Lestat: It's different. I don't have feelings for her.
Louis: He did me some face and I drove him home!
Lestat: [shouts] I heard your hearts dancing!

Lestat: If you listen to me, if you finally submit to your nature, you will be filled, Louis, with all the life you can hold. You will see death in all its beauty, life as it is only known at the very point of death. You alone, of all creatures, can see death with that impunity. You alone, under the rising moon, can strike like the hand of God.

Lestat: This primitive country has picked you clean. It has shackled you in permanent exile. Every room you enter, every hat you're forced to wear. The stern landlord, the deferential businessman, the loyal son! All these roles you conform to, and none of them your true nature! What rage you must feel as you choke on your sorrow. The first time I laid eyes on you, your beautiful face, I saw that sorrow. I did not know how it got there or why it was so voluminous. I can take away that sorrow, Louis. I can give you that death you begged your feeble, blind, degenerate, nonexistent god for. But I can do it joyfully. I can swap this life of shame, swap it out for a dark gift and a power you can't begin to imagine. You just have to ask me for it. You just have to nod your beautiful head and say yes. I love you, Louis. You are loved. I send my love to you, and you send it back round to me. And this circle, this home we've barely had a glimpse of, know it frightens me as much as it does you.

Claudia: I've read a lot of books. Started with Persia and Babylon, the old gods who longed for blood. A lot of it was popcorn, but a few old tomes. A Romanian tract on 'vampirs.' A strange, old Hungarian text, 'Masticatione Mortuorum,' the 'chewing dead.' I plan to leave for that part of the world as soon as I can.
Lestat: So... quick stop home to do laundry before you fuck off for good.
Claudia: A quick stop to pick up Louis.
Lestat: Perused a few folklore anthologies, and now you're going to cross the ocean and take on a society of monsters.
Claudia: If what I read is lies, then tell me what's true.
[Lestat stares without answering]
Claudia: [scoffs] Seven years and what's changed, other than you need a housekeeper?

[forcing Claudia to look at Charlie in the incinerator]
Lestat: Stop squirming and watch. Remember this, his face as it melts. This is why we don't get close to mortals. Because sooner or later, they end up dead.

Lestat: I had planned to make a new life for myself in St. Louis. That was to be my destiny. And now I know I was right. Only it turns out the saint is not a city, but a handsome man with a most agreeable disposition.
Lily: You're his destiny, Louis!
Lestat: Destined to be very good friends.

[disposing of a body]
Lestat: This was your man's esquire sent in his stead.
Louis: I was hungry.
Lestat: A stone's throw from your place of business. What were you thinking?
Louis: He disrespected me.
Lestat: How did he do that?
Louis: He said I did a good job.
Lestat: You are a library of confusion!

Lestat: I'm not sure how I feel about that pleated skirt.
Louis: It's chiffon. It has movement.

Claudia: [Crying] Let me go, Lestat.
Lestat: In Louis hour of need? I'm afraid I can't allow that. He's very fragile right now. Worse than the last time you abandoned him, when you filled your head with knowledge and hitched a ride on a motorbike.
[Claudia shudders]
Lestat: Well, you wouldn't talk of it. Louis insisted I not ask. I love our family, but the rules are, 'No secrets!' Fortunate for our family, when I put my mind to it, I can hear the thoughts of other vampires at a very great distance.
Claudia: Bastard.
Lestat: He thinks of you often... Bruce.
Claudia: Fucking bastard!
Lestat: I couldn't agree more. What he did to you was in very poor taste. Could you imagine if something like that happened to you again? Louis would never forgive himself. Back in your cage, sweetheart. We endure each other for Louis' happiness. So come home, and make him happy. Because if you try this again, Claudia, I won't snap your leg, defile your pocket and zoom off on a motorbike. I'll turn your bones to dust.

Lestat: [dragging Louis by the throat] I fought myself a million times, fought my nature, controlled my temper. I never once harmed you.
Claudia: Uncle Les!
Lestat: [stops] It's 'Uncle Les' now suddenly?
Claudia: Let him go! He didn't do nothin'! Let him go! It's me you want!
Lestat: Listen to me, and listen very carefully, my infant death. It was *never* you!
Lestat: [to Louis] I chose you!
[bites Louis's neck and flies off with him]

Louis: You killed Lily.
Lestat: Cut short that magnificent life she was living? What a tragedy.
Louis: Ain't no fever out there. That's you. You bringin' the death to town.
Lestat: I give death to those deserving. I'm not the Devil. You were wrong about that. But I can give you death.

Lestat: There is one thing about being a vampire that I most fear above all else... and that is loneliness. You can't imagine the emptiness. A void stretching out for decades at a time. You take this feeling away from me, Louis. We must stay together and take precaution... and never part.

Claudia: How old are you again, Uncle Les?
Louis: Hundred and sixty.
Lestat: A hundred and fifty-nine.

Louis: She's coming up on 33.
Lestat: It's a lick and a promise in vampire years.
Claudia: Maybe, but I'm not your child anymore. That's rule number five. I'll be your companion, your sister.
Lestat: It's not as simple as choosing a new family configuration. 'Now I'm your cousin.' 'Now I'm your aunt.' I am your maker!
Claudia: But not my uncle or my daddy. I'm your sister or that's the door.

Lestat: Hunting is an art. You have the power to subdue anyone you want, but sometimes restraint is your most powerful weapon.

Louis: You ever think that we -- that's to say, our kind -- were put on earth for a larger purpose?
Lestat: I put you on this earth. Your purpose is to enjoy yourself.
Louis: That can't be all there is. I know you don't believe that.
Lestat: Well, tell me what I believe, Louis. Excavate the hoarded thoughts buried beneath my damned soul.

Claudia: Who am I supposed to love? You two have each other? Who's my Lestat? Who's my Louis? I'm not human. What human would want me? Perverts? Like the uncle at the roomin' house who used to watch me pee? Or little boys? And forty years from now, still little boys?
[shouts]
Claudia: How you gonna fix it, huh? Which one of you gonna fuck me?
Lestat: Well, you're not my type. I like a fuller figure.
Louis: Lestat!
Lestat: She's being impossible!

Lestat: Now here's a treat I think you're ready for. This is what the meat calls a 'lover's lane,' and by my estimation, no blood is sweeter. Young people, swollen with passion, denied spirits by this senseless prohibition, park along this lonely stretch to contemplate that most mysterious of mathematical equations -- how one plus one... becomes one.
Claudia: They come out here to do math?
Lestat: You've been too sheltered, my belladonnic beauty.

Louis: Flaubert's style is so dense.
Lestat: Louis Armstrong's in town tonight, playing at the Pelican. Should we make it a night of the two Louis?
Louis: The absence of metaphor is so striking.
Lestat: You sound like every pompous Sorbonne student I've ever eaten.
Louis: Should I do like you instead? Read the first ten pages of every book? Pass myself off as cultured?
Lestat: Well, at least you're listening. I sit there thinking, 'Light yourself on fire, see if he would notice!'
Louis: [talking over Lestat] Use my middling command of literary canon to impress some hapless human I'm gonna kill in a few hours anyway.

Paul: Are you one with Christ, Monsieur Lioncourt?
Louis: How 'bout you shut your damn mouth?
Florence: Louis...
Lestat: That's alright, Louis, Madame. The birds speak for him... I came to know Christ in a monastery. I wanted to be a priest. Just like you, Paul.
[Lestat begins to hypnotize Paul]
Lestat: And under the guidance and discipline of the monks who lived there, I came to memorize both testaments, the writings of Assisi, Aquinas, Erasmus, all the saints and scholars. My father, a vulgar man, did not think much of this education. And so he and my brothers conspired to pull me out, lock me away, where, between beatings, starvations and the failure of Christ to intercede the beatings and starvations, I slowly forgot all about the testaments, Assisi, Aquinas, Erasmus, all of it. And so to answer your boring question, there is an ocean between Christ and myself! J'espère que cela satisfera les oiseaux perchés dans la cage de votre esprit!
Louis: [slams the table] Don't do that shit here! Not with my family. You understand?
Lestat: [long pause] I am cursed with my father's temper at times. The rudeness is all mine.
Florence: That's alright. It's the humidity, it does that sometimes.

Lestat: Bonsoir, monsieur. You speak French?
Lily: We speak all sorts of tongues in New Orleans.
Louis: It's a hard table to get. How'd you manage it?
Lestat: How'd you manage to get yourself through the front door?
Louis: Excuse me?
Lestat: I mean that as a compliment, a man of your race to have privileges here.
Lily: Louis has a small empire of his own down the street. It gives him privileges.
Lestat: [laughs]
Louis: Somethin' funny about that?
Lestat: Your name is Louis. Of course it's Louis.
Louis: I didn't get your name, fella.
Lestat: Je suis désolé. Je m'amuse trop en privé. I know who you are, sir. You're the man who made me buy a townhouse in the Quarter. I owe you everything. Please join us.

Lestat: I realize the hypocrite I am, emphasizing cleanliness after I overindulged, but a proper disposal is the penance of a sated vampire. And you won't always have a conveniently-located graveyard nearby.

Lestat: [to Louis, telepathically, during a card came] These men look down on you. I have to say, I find it appalling how men like yourself are treated in this country of yours... Ten percent. Fifteen percent. Do you not know your value? Do you suffer these indignities for some larger purpose? And do you think two pair will win the hour?

Lestat: We had a good run, but I did it for Louis. I do everything for Louis.
Antoinette: Yeah, I heard that about you two.
Lestat: Oh? What have you heard?
Antoinette: I'm not a gossip.
Lestat: But I am.
Antoinette: Well, people at the Azalea, they say...
[Lestat runs his hands along Antoinette's waist]
Antoinette: You're confusing me.
[laughs]
Lestat: Oh, come now. I don't bite. What do the employees of the Azalea say about Louis and Lestat?
Antoinette: I'll answer with a question. Are there two beds upstairs or one?
Lestat: Do you want to find out?
Louis: No one goes upstairs, Miss Brown.
Antoinette: Well, there's my answer.
Lestat: Still, what do you imagine confines us to a single note? Why not a chord? Why not a cluster?

Lestat: New to the... the New World, I am.
Louis: That explains the clothes.

Claudia: He picked you over me.
Lestat: Louis couldn't pick an apple off a tree in his current state.

Antoinette: Mr. Louis, you have to convince Lestat to keep playin'.
Louis: Got a better chance makin' the Mississippi run north.
Lestat: We had a good run, but I did it for Louis. I do everything for Louis.

[Lestat holds a bleeding and beaten Louis while hovering in the air thousands of miles above New Orleans]
Lestat: I have waited, Louis. I have patiently waited, in vain, for you to love me as I love you. Just say it. Say, 'Lestat, I am never going to love you.' It would help me a great deal to hear that from your lips. Your quivering, hateful lips.
Louis: Let go of me!
Lestat: Anything for you.
[Lestat lets go of Louis, who plummets to the ground]

Lestat: Do you think God heard you, Louis? In that tawdry box, through this pig vessel, this-- this charlatan? Do you not see how unworthy he is? How can you humiliate yourself like this?

Lestat: The vampires out there are vicious.
[seeing the look on Claudia's face]
Lestat: Oh... but you've learned that already. Who did you meet out there in the American hinterland? Read her, Louis.
Claudia: That's it, keep him scared.
[to Louis]
Claudia: That's his way.
Lestat: The vampires in Europe are much, much worse.
Claudia: [to Louis] But I think *he's* scared.
Lestat: I never asked. How did Charlie taste? Like the love you'll never really know?
Claudia: [to Louis] And when he's scared, he ridicules.

[both shouting]
Lestat: I heard your hearts dancing!
Louis: You watched the whole thing like some creeper!
Lestat: And then I watched you pull over and drain a dog and run down an alleyway for two more rats! This is not a life!
Louis: That's 'cause you took my life!

Lestat: I came to know Christ in a monastery. I wanted to be a priest. Just like you, Paul. And under the guidance and discipline of the monks who lived there, I came to memorize both testaments, the writings of Assisi, Aquinas, Erasmus, all the saints and scholars. My father, a vulgar man, did not think much of this education. And so he and my brothers conspired to pull me out, lock me away, where, between beatings, starvations and the failure of Christ to intercede the beatings and starvations, I slowly forgot all about the testaments, Assisi, Aquinas, Erasmus, all of it. And so to answer your boring question, there is an ocean between Christ and myself! J'espère que cela satisfera les oiseaux perchés dans la cage de votre esprit!

Claudia: Let him go! It's me you want!
Lestat: Listen to me, and listen very carefully, my infant death. It was *never* you.

Lestat: Claudia... you left, without saying goodbye. Again. I'm sure it was an oversight, but still. You'd think your creator had earned the courtesy.
Claudia: You didn't want me. You made me for Louis.
Lestat: And he needs you now more than ever. He's in a terrible state.
Claudia: He said I could go. He picked you over me.
Lestat: Louis couldn't pick an apple off a tree in his current state. He'd grip it, tug at it, then, weak as he is, the stem would hold.

Lestat: The first time I laid eyes on you, your beautiful face, I saw that sorrow. I did not know how it got there or why it was so voluminous. I can take away that sorrow, Louis. I can give you that death you begged your feeble, blind, degenerate, nonexistent god for. But I can do it joyfully. I can swap this life of shame, swap it out for a dark gift and a power you can't begin to imagine. You just have to ask me for it. You just have to nod your beautiful head and say yes.

Lestat: She was a destitute little girl, destined to live an inconsequential little life.
Louis: And we took it from her. We cursed her.

[about the murder of Alderman Fenwick and the ensuing riots]
Louis: I didn't do it for me. I did it for my city, my people. Destroy our businesses and buy the land for cheaper. I know what they're doing!
Lestat: So that torturous death was for your people? That garish display of his body like some public art piece was for your people?
Louis: I didn't see this comin'.
Lestat: Save that lie for yourself. Did you not smile when he begged? Did you not feel pleasure as you carved him up?
Louis: Maybe you saw it comin' and didn't stop me. Maybe you went quiet on purpose.
Lestat: You did what you did because it gave you pleasure. Companion of the Dark Gift, finally. We should make this our anniversary.

Louis: How many of us are out there? We can't be the only ones.
Lestat: How many vampires? Not many, I'm afraid. Maybe a hundred... A hundred and one.

Lestat: There's a column in here about the history of this lovely square. It says that the man who designed it did so after the Place de Vosges in Paris. I can see that. Used to be called the Place d'Armes. I prefer that. Don't you?
Louis: Mm-hmm.
Lestat: The Louisiana Purchase was signed here. Penny wise, franc foolish.
Louis: Say anything about how they used to take runaway slaves, cut their heads off, and pike 'em on the iron gates as a warning?

Lestat: Be my companion, Louis. Be all the beautiful things you are, and be them without apology. For all eternity.

Lestat: [reading from Claudia's diary] 'Dear diary, am I gonna be a virgin every single time I do it? Won't my skin down there grow back like my hair does when I cut it?'
Louis: Jesus.

Lestat: The sun gives life to everything but us. I should have told you that. The life of a vampire has its challenges and its rewards. But I think New Orleans, with its music, culture, cuisine, shipping yards, conventioneers, thrill-seeking tourists far-flung from their homes, the laissez-faire attitude of the local police force...
[chuckles]
Lestat: Oh yes, the perfect setting for a vampire home... a vampire romance.

Lestat: When I first started learning English, I abhorred it. Every word felt like a doorknob falling out of my mouth. Chapeau was a hat, étoile was a star, a pamplemousse was a grapefruit...
Louis: Killin' folks ain't a second language!
Lestat: ...but, but! When I started dreaming in English, that's when I embraced it. And now I have English consonants to thank for this astonishing jawline.

Louis: [reading a newspaper article] 'Rash of mysterious deaths at university libraries perplex authorities.' Listen to this. 'Housekeeping staff at Vanderbilt University tried to rouse students who appeared to have fallen asleep at their studies, only to discover that they were, in fact, deceased. Similar incidents have been recorded at the College of Charleston, Lincoln University in Jefferson City, and the University of Alabama.' It's her. It has to be her.
Lestat: It could be her. But I am the one who is presently standing in front of you. And, unlike Claudia, I am a full-blooded adult with all the right appendages. So if my considerable considerables continue to be squandered...
[Lestat storms out as Louis keeps reading]

[in Paul's funeral procession]
Lestat: Mes condoléances.
Louis: Pas ici.
Lestat: An elegant coffin. Would you tell me where you purchased?
Louis: Move on.
Lestat: I wait on my balcony every night. You've been avoiding me.
Louis: I have been occupied.
Lestat: Miss Lily proved herself a poor substitute and I don't take kindly to being avoided.
Louis: It's my brother's funeral!
Lestat: Believe me when I tell you, your brother longed for that flagstone.