Love Quote by Anne Rice

Rice’s “physically” is doing sly, protective work. She doesn’t say she loves New Orleans spiritually, morally, or even culturally; she loves it in the body. Trees, balmy air, beautiful days: sensory shorthand that turns the city into a climate you can wear. Coming from a novelist who built an empire out of gothic longing and eroticized atmosphere, it’s not small talk. It’s a declaration that place is an instrument, and she intends to be played by it.

The list is almost stubbornly pastoral, which is its own kind of irony for a writer associated with the baroque and the nocturnal. Rice doesn’t invoke Bourbon Street, jazz funerals, or the city’s well-marketed mystique. She chooses what can’t be commodified as easily: humidity, light, foliage. That restraint reads like a corrective to the tourist gaze, a way of claiming New Orleans as lived environment rather than aesthetic prop.

Then she lands on the bluntest flex in the paragraph: “I have a beautiful house here.” It’s intimacy, but it’s also ownership, stability, and permission. In a city where history is measured in who gets to stay and who gets washed out - economically, politically, literally - the house is subtextual armor. Rice is placing herself not as a visitor enchanted by local color but as a resident with roots and square footage.

Context matters: Rice’s New Orleans was both muse and brand, a setting she helped mythologize for late-20th-century readers. This quote reveals the mechanism behind that mythmaking: start with the body, then build the haunted mansion.