Faith & Spirit Quote by Anne Rice

Rice understands the market value of darkness, but she’s not just selling goth atmosphere here. She’s diagnosing a psychological habit: even when people evict God and “goodness” from their mental furniture, they keep a spare key for the devil. The line works because it catches a modern contradiction in motion. Secular sophistication often prides itself on disenchantment, yet it still craves a shape for fear, temptation, and catastrophe. The devil is a narrative convenience: he explains the worst of us without demanding the best of us.

Her pivot - “I don’t know why. No, I do indeed know why.” - is classic Ricean stagecraft: the speaker performs uncertainty, then admits the darker certainty beneath it. It’s less a debate move than a confession of experience. Rice wrote from within a long wrestle with faith, guilt, desire, and redemption; her vampires are basically moral philosophers with fangs, dramatizing how hunger turns into ethics. In that ecosystem, “evil is always possible” isn’t theology so much as a weather report. It’s immediate, low-effort, forever on standby.

“Goodness is eternally difficult” lands like an accusation at both believers and cynics. Evil doesn’t need maintenance; it recruits through fatigue. Goodness requires attention, restraint, and repetition - the unsexy labor of choosing rightly when no one’s watching. Rice isn’t romanticizing the devil; she’s explaining why we keep re-casting him, even in an age that thinks it outgrew him.