Thomas Harris Quotes

“We routinely leave our small children in day care among strangers. At the same time, in our guilt we evince paranoia about strangers and foster fear in children.”

“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.”

“Nothing made me happen. I happened.”

“I expect most psychiatrists have a patient or two they'd like to refer to me.”

“I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti”

“Don't think you can persuade me with appeals to my intellectual vanity.”

“You would think such a day would tremble to begin…”

“The most stable elements, Clarice, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver.

Between iron and silver. I think that is appropriate for you.”

“I don’t think I've ever made up anything, everything has happened. Nothing's made up. You don't have to make anything up in this world.”

“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.”

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

“You may have noticed that in most crucifixions the hands point to, say, a quarter to three, or ten till two at the earliest, while the feet are at six. On this watch face, Jesus is on the cross, as you see there, and the arms revolve to indicate the time.”

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

“The tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.”

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

“Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.”

“Silence can mock.”

“We can only learn so much and live.”

“I'm not sure you get wiser as you get older, Starling, but you do learn to dodge a certain amount of hell.”

“Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.”

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

“Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.”

“What does he do, Clarice? What is the first and principal thing he does, what need does he serve by killing? He covets. How do we begin to covet? We begin by coveting what we see every day.”

“I'm giving serious thought into eating yor wife” - Hannibal Lecter”

“You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.”

“He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart.”

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

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

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

“God's creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again.”

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

“The advantage of beating a mute is he can't tell on you.”

“I am the dragon, and you call me insane.”

“It rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it is told.”

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

“… It is not healing to see your childhood home, but it helps you measure whether you are broken, and how and why, assuming you want to know.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“A census taker tried to quantify me once. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone. Go back to school, little Starling.”

“On a related subject, Signore Pazzi, I must confess to you: I'm giving serious thought to eating your wife.”

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

“How seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home.”

“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.”

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

“Shiloh isn’t haunted – men are haunted.
Shiloh doesn’t care.”

“I'll confess it is pleasant to look at you asleep. You're quite beautiful, Clarice.”

“I would not have had that happen to you. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.”

“Life's too slippery for books, Clarice; anger appears as lust, lupus presents as hives.”

“Lecter is so lucid, so perceptive; he's trained in psychiatry… and he's a mass murderer.”

“Gratitude’s got a short half-life, Clarice.”

“In her way, she was a hard one. Faith in any sort of natural justice was nothing but a night light; she knew of that. Whatever she did, she would end the same way with everyone does: flat on her back with a tube in her nose, wondering, "Is this all?”

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

“He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.”

“The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room.”

“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.”

“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.”

“To write a novel, you begin with what you can see and then you add what came before and what came after.

… You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.”

“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.”

“The first step in the development of taste is to be willing to to credit your own opinion.”

“Some days you go to your office and you're the only one who shows up, none of the characters show up, and you sit there by yourself, feeling like an idiot. And some days everybody shows up ready to work. You have to show up at your office every day. If an idea comes by, you want to be there to get it in.”