"What! Because there is an accidental likeness between me and an old picture, am I to be set down as a vampyre? Why, when I was in Austria last, I saw an old portrait of a celebrated court fool, and you so strongly resemble it, that I was quite struck when I first saw you with the likeness; but I was not so unpolite as to tell you that I considered you were the court fool turned vampyre."

1 am one who has witnessed time's mutations on man and on his works, and I have pitied neither; I have seen the fall of empires, and sighed not that high-reaching ambition was toppled in the dust. I have seen the grave close over the young and the beautiful — those whom 1 have doomed by my insatiable thirst for human blood to death, long ere the usual span of life was past, but I never loved till now."

...A hundred years is a tolerable long space of time, you know."