Time & Perspective Quote by Anne Rice

Anne Rice is doing something sly here: she frames “Christian against Christian” as both a scandal and a distraction, then demotes the whole exhausting culture-war machinery with a single managerial phrase - “I have no time.” It’s an almost domestic dismissal of theological cage-matches, the kind of line that punctures self-serious sectarianism more effectively than a manifesto. The pivot is crucial: she doesn’t argue doctrine; she reorders priorities.

The subtext is a rebuke to identity-as-combat. Rice isn’t pretending disagreement evaporates; she’s insisting the internal blood sport has become a substitute for the harder, less theatrical labor of actual care. “Trying to love other people” is pointedly modest. She doesn’t claim saintliness, just effort. That little verb - trying - makes the ethic credible, because it admits failure and fatigue. Then she lands the punch: “a full-time job.” Love becomes work, not glow. It’s a line that refuses the sentimental version of Christianity that’s all symbols and no sweat.

Context matters because Rice spent her career writing about belief as appetite, longing, and moral confusion - vampires and saints sharing the same humid air. She also lived publicly through shifts in religious identification, including a much-discussed return to Catholicism and later distance from institutional positions. Read through that biography, the quote feels like a boundary-setting memo from someone who has watched communities turn purity into entertainment. She’s not surrendering conviction; she’s indicting the performative cruelty that too often passes for it, and offering a quieter metric: How are you treating the person in front of you, today?