Thomas Harris Quotes

Avarice is not unknown in Italy, and Rinaldo Pazzi had imbibed plenty with his native air. But his natural acquisitiveness and ambition had been whetted in America, where every influence is felt more quickly, including the death of Jehovah and the incumbency of Mammon. When

I have no plans to call on you, Clarice, the world being more interesting with you in it.

Which do you think, Commendatore? Bowels in or out?

It's hard to have anything isn't it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it. This is a damn slippery planet.

Can you smell his sweat? That peculiar goatish odor is trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid. Remember it, it's the smell of schizophrenia.

There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named
the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.

Spaces devoted to Hannibal Lecter's earliest years differ from the other archives in being incomplete. Some are static scenes, fragmentary, like painted attic shards held together by blank plaster. Other rooms hold sound and motion, great snakes wrestling and heaving in the dark and lit in flashes. Pleas and screaming fill some places on the grounds where Hannibal himself cannot go. But the corridors do not echo screaming, and there is music if you like.

Evil's just destructive? Then storms are evil, if it's that simple. And we have fire, and there there's hail. Underwriters lump it all under 'Acts of God.

Variously weighted with lies, guns, and groceries, the three of them were a small and solemn troop.

He's a monster. I think of him as one of those pitiful things that are born in hospitals from time to time. They feed it, and keep it warm, but they don't put it on the machines and it dies. Lecter is the same way in his head, but he looks normal and nobody could tell.

One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.

In the gathering gloom only his white Nike headband and his white Nike shoes and the white stripe down the side of his dark Nike running suit were visible, as though there were no man at all among the trademarks.

it would hold among its molecules the vibrations of all the conversations ever held in its presence. All the exchanges, the petty irritations, the deadly revelations, the flat announcements of disaster, the grunts and poetry of love. Sit

He came back to the car, long legs lifting high in the snow, and there was snow in his hair and on his eyelashes and I remembered that I love him. It felt like something breaking with a little pain and spilling warm.

The enemy inside Graham agreed with any accusation.

Graham had stared through the bars for about five seconds when Lecter opened his eyes and said, "That's the same atrocious aftershave you wore in court." "I keep getting it for Christmas.

He had known since the age of nine that essentially he was alone and that he would always be alone, a conclusion more common to the forties.
Now, in his forties, he was seized by a fantasy life with the brilliance and freshness and immediacy of childhood. It took him a step beyond alone.
At a time when other men first see and fear their isolation, Dolarhyde's became understandable to him: he was alone because he was unique. With the fervor of conversion he saw that if he worked at it, if he followed the true urges he had kept down for so long, cultivated them as the inspirations they truly were, he could become.

Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn't it?

You said that I, who see more than you, am insane. I, who pushed the world so much further than you, am insane. I have dared more than you, I have pressed my unique seal so much deeper in the earth, where it will last longer than your dust ... you owe me awe.

We live in a primitive time - don't we, Will? - neither savage nor wise. Half measures are the curse of it. Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books.

Who are you anyway?" Krendler said. "You're not Starling. You've got the spot on your face, but you're not Starling.

The washing machine's rhythm was like a giant heartbeat, and the rush of its waters was what the unborn hear- our last memory of peace.

Hello Clarice...

Haven't you ever had people coming over and no time to shop? You have to make do with what's in the fridge, Clarice. May I call you Clarice?

They drew the line on dogs at the hospital and wouldn't let the dog in. A fireman, instructed to drop it off at the animal shelter, took it home with him instead.

Back at his chair he cannot remember what he was reading. He feels the books beside him to find the one that is warm.

Problem solving is hunting. It's a savage pleasure and we're born to it.

[T]here is no consensus in the psychiatric community that Dr. Lecter should be termed a
man. He has long been regarded by his professional peers in psychiatry, many of whom
fear his acid pen in the professional journals, as something entirely Other. For
convenience, they term him "monster".

Dr. Doemling, does he want to fuck her or kill her, or eat her, or what?' Mason asked, exhausting the possibilities he could see. 'Probably all three,' Dr. Doemling said.

Killing somebody, even if you have to do it, it feels that bad?'
'Willy, it's one of the ugliest things in the world.

These are probably dogs,

The lambs will stop for now. But, Clarice, you judge yourself with all the mercy of the dungeon scales at Threave; you'll have to earn it again and again, the blessed silence. Because it's the plight that drives you, seeing the plight, and the plight will not end, ever.

The intimacy of the detail - why The Silence of the Lambs is quite possibly the Thriller Writer's bible.

if she looked deeply where the dark sucks in the sparks, she might see something useful. She thought she might see glee. Thank

In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind, like those in a medieval dungeon floor - the stinking oubliettes, named for forgetting, bottle-shaped cells in solid rock with the trapdoor in the top. Nothing escapes from them quietly to ease us. A quake, some betrayal by our safeguards, and sparks of memory fire the noxious gases - things trapped for years fly free, ready to explode in pain and drive us to dangerous behavior ...

That there had to be a place in the world for Mischa, a prime place vacated for her, and I came to think, Clarice, that the best place in the world was yours.

I think it's easy to mistake understanding for empathy - we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It's hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.

Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of influences.

Dark swarmed behind her eyelids and, in jerky seconds of sleep, she dreamed the dark came into her. Dark came insidious, up her nose and into her ears, damp fingers of dark proposed themselves to each of her body openings. She put her hand over her mouth and nose, put her other hand over her vagina, clenched her buttocks, turned one ear to the mattress and sacrificed the other ear to the intrusion of the dark.

Jack Crawford heard the rhythm and syntax of his own speech in Graham's voice. He had heard Graham do that before, with other people. Often in intense conversation Graham took on the other person's speech patterns. At first, Crawford had thought he was doing it deliberately, that it was a gimmick to get the back-and-forth rhythm going.
Later Crawford realized that Graham did it involuntarily, that sometimes he tried to stop and couldn't.

This is the Death's-head Moth," he said. "That's nightshade she's sitting on - we're hoping she'll lay." The moth was wonderful and terrible to see, its large brown-black wings tented like a cloak, and on its wide furry back, the signature device that has struck fear in men for as long as men have come upon it suddenly in their happy gardens. The domed skull, a skull that is both skull and face, watching from its dark eyes, the cheekbones, the zygomatic arch traced exquisitely beside the eyes. "Acherontia styx," Pilcher said. "It's named for two rivers in Hell. Your man, he drops the bodies in a river every time - did I read that?" "Yes," Starling said. "Is it rare?" "In this part of the world it is. There aren't any at all in nature.

Good-bye Clarice. Will you let me know if ever the lambs stop screaming?" "Yes." Pembry was taking her arm. It was go or fight him. "Yes," she said. "I'll tell you." "Do you promise?""Yes.

When you are writing a novel, you aren't making it up. The story is already there. You just have to find it.

It was Krendler's nature to both appreciate Starling's leg and look for the hamstring.

Sanity and apparent rationality are not the same, comrade.

He was alone because he was Unique.

Pity Catherine Martin won't ever see the sun again. The sun's a mattress fire her God died in, Clarice.

I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

Barney did not reply. He looked at Krendler as though the left and right hemispheres of Krendler's brain were two dogs stuck together.

The pudgy one moved his bishop and immediately turned the beetle around and started it trudging back the other way. "If the beetle just cuts across the corner, is time up then?" Starling asked. "Of course time's up then," the pudgy one said loudly, without looking up. "Of course it's up then. How do you play? Do you make him cross the whole board? Who do you play against, a sloth?

I love myself that much and I will never apologize to you.

Good nutrition has given you some length of bone, but you're not more than one generation out of the mines Officer Starling.

Starling discovered that she had traded feeling frightened for feeling cheap. Of the two, she preferred feeling frightened.

This was a holiday and killing Grentz was preferable to skiing. The

They sat in a row on the couches and in wheelchairs listening to the radio, their faded eyes fixed on the fish or on nothing or something they saw a long time ago.
Francis would always remember the shuffle of feet on linoleum in the hot and buzzing day, and the smell of stewed tomatoes and cabbage from the kitchen, the smell of old people like meat wrappers dried in the sun, and always the radio.

Hannibal at eighteen was rooting for Mephistopheles and contemptuous of Faust, but he only half-listened to the climax. He was watching and breathing Lady Murasaki ...

Shiloh isn't haunted – men are haunted.
Shiloh doesn't care.

Orion is above the horizon now, and near it Jupiter, brighter than it will ever be ... But i expect you can see it too. Some of our stars are the same.

Silence can mock.

It's fear, Jack. The man deals with a huge amount of fear.'
Because he got hurt?'
No, not entirely. Fear comes with imagination, it's a penalty, it's the price of imagination.

Flog no one else with meat.

A week later he was working for the Tattler.

This is a frame. I think Mason Verger is trying to capture Dr. Lecter himself for purposes of personal revenge. I think he just missed him in Florence. I think Mr. Krendler may be in collusion with Verger and wants the FBI's effort against Dr. Lecter to work for Verger. I think Paul Krendler of the Department of Justice is making money out of this and I think he is willing to destroy me to do it. Mr. Krendler has behaved toward me before in an inappropriate manner and is acting now out of spite as well as financial self-interest. Only this week he called me a 'cornpone country pussy.' I would challenge Mr. Krendler before this body to take a lie detector test with me on these matters. I'm at your convenience. We could do it now.

Sometimes Crawford's tone reminded Starling of the know-it-all caterpillar in Lewis Caroll.

Fear comes from the imagination, it's a penalty, it's the price for imagination

Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to it.

Intense fear comes in waves; the body can't stand it for long at a time.

The exposition of Atrocious Torture Instruments could not fail to appeal to a connoisseur of the worst in mankind. But the essence of the worst, the true asafoetida of the human spirit, is not found in the Iron Maiden or the whetted edge; Elemental Ugliness is found in the faces of the crowd.

When I said that Mercy stood Within the borders of the wood, I meant the lenient beast with claws And bloody swift-dispatching jaws. - LAWRENCE SPINGARN

We don't begin to covet with imagined things. Coveting is a very literal sin–we begin to covet with tangibles, we begin with what we see every day.

Before his Becoming, he would not have dared any of this. Now he realized he could do anything. Anything. Anything.

It occured to Starling how much Roden would benefit from an elbow smash in the hinge of his jaw.

When Will Graham could open his right eye, he saw the clock and knew where he was- an intensive-care unit. He knew to watch the clock. Its movement assured him that this was passing, would pass. That's what it was there for.

Dr. Fell, do you believe a man could become so obsessed with a woman, from a single encounter?
Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for her and find nourishment in the very sight of her? I think so. But would she see through the bars of his plight and ache for him?

Glistened on the rope, almost level now. Das

One quality in a person doesn't rule out any other quality. They can exist side by side, good and terrible. Socrates said it a lot better.

The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.

It's indignity you can't stand, Hannibal, you're like a cat that way.

What do you look at while you're making up your mind? Ours is not a reflective culture, we do no raise our eyes up to the hills. Most of the time we decide the critical things while looking at the linoleum floor of an institutional corridor, or whispering hurriedly in a waiting room with a television blatting nonsense.

Graham switched on the lights and bloodstains shouted at him from the walls, from the mattress and the floor. The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room full of dark stains drying.

Graham sat on the floor until his head was quiet. Still, still, be still.

You know how cats do. They hide to die. Dogs come home.

Did you ever think, Clarice, why the Philistines don't understand you? It's because you are the answer to Samson's riddle. You are the honey in the lion.

She didn't give a damn about some of them, but she had grown to learn that inattention can be a stratagem to avoid pain, and that it is often misread as shallowness and indifference.

But the face on the pillow, rosy in the firelight, is certainly that of Clarice Starling, and she sleeps
deeply, sweetly, in the silence of the lambs.

She wanted to go inside. She wanted to go in, wanting it as we want to jump from balconies, as the glint of the rails tempts us when we hear the approaching train.

He follows several trains of thought at once, without distraction from any, and one of the trains is always for his own amusement.

Sure, a surgeon can stand to look at a mutilated body," Crawford said, crumpling his cup and stepping on the pedal of the covered wastebasket. "But I don't think a doctor can stand to see a life wasted.

If he really Loved Grandmother, he should be the thing to be afraid of in the dark.

When you were so depressed after you shot Mr. Garrett Jacob Hobbs to death, it wasn't the act that got you down, was it? Really, didn't you feel so bad because killing him felt so good? Think about it, but don't worry about it. Why shouldn't it feel good? It must feel good to God - He does it all the time, and are we not made in His image?

Was that job offer you worked into the blessing? I never saw such tact.

Ready when you are Sergeant Pempbry.

He liked the Leedses. He was sorry that he had been to the morgue. He thought the madman who visited them might have liked them too. But the madman would like them better the way they were now.

Who's the subject?"
"The psychiatrist - Dr. Hannibal Lecter," Crawford said.
A brief silence follows the name, always, in any civilized gathering.

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The sun's
a mattress fire her God died in.

In the 1980's, the Golden Age of Terrorism, procedures ...

If I saw you everyday forever, I would remember this time.

Starling looked at Crawford steadily, but she was too still. "Hannibal the Cannibal," she said.

He was a person who agreed with everything his victim said before he killed him.

They waited for the elevator. " Most people love butterflies and hate moth," he said. "But moths are more interesting - more engaging."
"They're destructive."
"Some are, a lot are, but they live in all kinds of ways. Just like we do." Silence for one floor.
"There's a moth, more than one in fact, that lives only on tears," he offered. "That's all they eat or drink."
"What kind of tears? Whose tears?"
"The tears of large land mammals, about our size.
The old definition of moth was, 'anything that gradually, silently eats, consumes, or wages any other thing.'
It was a verb for destruction too ...

But when Krendler's volume became intrusive, Dr. Lecter retrieved his crossbow from a corner.