Faith & Spirit Quote by Anne Rice

A clean, almost clinical sentence, and that’s the point: Anne Rice frames apostasy not as melodrama but as a decisive intellectual act. “Broke” does the heavy lifting. It’s not “drifted away” or “stopped believing”; it’s rupture, a snapped bond. The phrase carries a faint whiff of scandal and liberation, the kind of line that signals a before-and-after in a life narrative. For a novelist who built an empire on sacred hunger, erotic dread, and the aesthetics of damnation, the understatement reads like practiced control: the spiritual earthquake is rendered in four blunt words.

“College” is the other loaded term, a cultural shorthand for sanctioned rebellion. It implies exposure to new books, new bodies, new philosophies; it’s where inherited certainties get stress-tested. Rice’s subtext is not just personal biography but a comment on modern formation: faith is presented as something you can outgrow, or at least interrogate hard enough that it fails to hold. That matters because her fiction treats belief less as doctrine than as atmosphere. Even when God is absent, the architecture of Catholicism remains: guilt, longing, ritual, the exquisite terror of eternity.

Context sharpens the intent. Rice’s public life included a later, very visible return toward Christianity and then another distancing. So this line isn’t merely a confession; it’s a stake in the ground for readers trying to map the moral weather of her work. She’s saying: the darkness isn’t a costume. It’s what’s left when the old light is removed, and you keep writing anyway.