Wit & Attitude Quote by Anne Rice

Anne Rice’s line lands like a confession with its hands held up: not atheism as swagger, but agnosticism as lived fact. The blunt inventory - “I know nothing,” “I have never seen,” “nor learned” - reads like testimony stripped of ornament, a refusal to pretend that the supernatural has left fingerprints on her life. It’s a striking move from a novelist famous for making the occult feel intimate. Rice built whole worlds out of vampires, angels, and haunted longing, yet here she draws a hard border between imagination and revelation.

The intent is defensive and liberating at once. Defensive, because it rebukes the moral policing that often shadows religious discourse: the demand that you declare for Team God or Team Devil, saved or damned. Liberating, because it asserts the dignity of uncertainty. Rice isn’t pleading ignorance; she’s rejecting a rigged courtroom where lack of “proof” is treated as guilt.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of certainty itself. “A secret that would damn or save my soul” frames salvation and damnation as information games, as if eternity hinges on access to the right insider knowledge. Rice pushes back: if the divine is real, it hasn’t bothered to show up in verifiable ways. That stance also echoes the emotional engine of her fiction: characters trapped between craving transcendence and distrusting the institutions that sell it. In context - her widely publicized shifts between Catholic devotion and disaffection - the quote becomes less a final verdict than a survival strategy: honest doubt as the only ethical posture in a universe that refuses to clarify its rules.