Top 100 Thomas Harris Quotes
#1. He cleared his throat. "One good thing about the range, Starling, is there's no politics out there." "No?" "You were right to secure that garage up at Baltimore there. You worried about the TV?
Thomas Harris
#2. Fear comes from the imagination, it's a penalty, it's the price for imagination
Thomas Harris
#3. He was a person who agreed with everything his victim said before he killed him.
Thomas Harris
#4. Far beneath the rusty Baltimore dawn, stirrings in the maximum security ward. Down where it is never dark the tormented sense beginning day as oysters in a barrel open to their lost tide. God's creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again and the ravers cleared their throats.
Thomas Harris
#5. You know how cats do. They hide to die. Dogs come home.
Thomas Harris
#6. She was charming way a cub is charming, a small cub that will grow up to be like one of the big cats. One you can't play with later
Thomas Harris
#7. On a related subject, Signore Pazzi, I must confess to you: I'm giving serious thought to eating your wife.
Thomas Harris
#8. Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to it.
Thomas Harris
#9. I love myself that much and I will never apologize to you.
Thomas Harris
#10. Pachelbel's Canon filled the sun-drowned room where they learned each other and even then the fear flickered across him like an osprey's shadow: This is too good to live for long.
Thomas Harris
#11. Before his Becoming, he would not have dared any of this. Now he realized he could do anything. Anything. Anything.
Thomas Harris
#12. The first step in the development of taste is to be willing to to credit your own opinion.
Thomas Harris
#13. In the 1980's, the Golden Age of Terrorism, procedures ...
Thomas Harris
#14. When the fox hears a rabbit scream, he comes running, but not to help.
Thomas Harris
#15. He snapped some icicles off a branch to make me a martini. 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. I hope the parka
Thomas Harris
#16. This was a holiday and killing Grentz was preferable to skiing. The
Thomas Harris
#17. Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of influences.
Thomas Harris
#18. You think nuts don't apply to the FBI? We get 'em all the time. A man in a Moe hairpiece applied in St. Louis last week. He had a bazooka, two rockets, and a bearskin shako in his golf bag." "Did you hire him?
Thomas Harris
#20. Lecter is so lucid, so perceptive; he's trained in psychiatry ... and he's a mass murderer.
Thomas Harris
#23. Bella, I love you, kid, he said in case she could hear. Fear brushed the walls of his chest, circling inside him like a bat in a house. Then he got hold of it. He wanted to get something for her, anything, but he did not want her to feel him let go of her hand.
Thomas Harris
#24. Starling looked at Crawford steadily, but she was too still. "Hannibal the Cannibal," she said.
Thomas Harris
#25. The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room.
Thomas Harris
#26. You would think such a day would tremble to begin ...
Thomas Harris
#27. In making friends, she was wary of people who foster dependency and feed on it. She had been involved with a few
the blind attract them, and they are the enemy.
Thomas Harris
#28. Intense fear comes in waves; the body can't stand it for long at a time.
Thomas Harris
#29. It was as though committing murders had purged him of lesser rudeness. Or perhaps, Starling thought, it excited him to see her marked in this particular way. She couldn't tell. The sparks in his eyes flew into his darkness like fireflies down a cave.
Thomas Harris
#30. The damp floor of the Internet sprouted Lecter theories like toadstools and sightings of the doctor rivaled those of Elvis in number.
Thomas Harris
#31. Every person is worth your time, Hannibal. If at first appearance a person seems dull, then look harder, look into him.
Thomas Harris
#32. Good nutrition has given you some length of bone, but you're not more than one generation out of the mines Officer Starling.
Thomas Harris
#33. Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.
Thomas Harris
#34. 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.
Thomas Harris
#35. 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.
Thomas Harris
#36. It's hard to have anything isn't it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it. This is a damn slippery planet.
Thomas Harris
#37. He moves smoothly and slowly, carrying his concentration like a brimming cup.
Thomas Harris
#38. No. You know - having to look. It's always bad, but you get so you can function anyway, as long as they're dead. The hospital, interviews, that's worse. You have to shake it off and keep on thinking. I don't believe I could do it now. I could make myself look, but I'd shut down the thinking.
Thomas Harris
#39. There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named
the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.
Thomas Harris
#40. 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.
Thomas Harris
#41. Are you looking for sympathy? You'll find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis
Thomas Harris
#42. 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.
Thomas Harris
#43. The advantage of beating a mute is he can't tell on you.
Thomas Harris
#44. Funerals often make us want sex - it's one in the eye for death.
Thomas Harris
#45. 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.
Thomas Harris
#46. He looked up and saw her and his breath stopped in his throat. His hands stopped too, still spread above the keyboard. Harpsichord notes do not carry, and in the sudden quiet of the drawing room they both heard him take his next breath.
Thomas Harris
#47. It occured to Starling how much Roden would benefit from an elbow smash in the hinge of his jaw.
Thomas Harris
#48. They tried sodium amytal on him three years ago trying to find out where he buried a Princeton student," Graham said. "He gave them a recipe for dip.
Thomas Harris
#49. Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.
Thomas Harris
#50. Dr. Lecter, erect as a dancer and carrying Starling in his arms, came out from behind the gate, walked barefoot out of the barn, through the pigs. Dr. Lecter walked through the sea of tossing backs and bloodspray in the barn.
Thomas Harris
#51. 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.
Thomas Harris
#52. You didn't draw a freak. You drew a man with a freak on his back. Nothing wrong with you, kid.
Thomas Harris
#53. 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.
Thomas Harris
#54. The longing need to be noticed that is often miscalled ego.
Thomas Harris
#55. Which do you think, Commendatore? Bowels in or out?
Thomas Harris
#56. 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.
Thomas Harris
#57. 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?
Thomas Harris
#58. Two things to begin with. First, we go on the premise that Dr. Lecter really knows something concrete. second, we remember that Lecter looks only for the fun. Never forget fun.
Thomas Harris
#59. The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.
Thomas Harris
#61. It's indignity you can't stand, Hannibal, you're like a cat that way.
Thomas Harris
#62. If he really Loved Grandmother, he should be the thing to be afraid of in the dark.
Thomas Harris
#63. 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.
Thomas Harris
#64. Baby needs a new pair of shoes,' he said. 'My baby doesn't need any shoes.
Thomas Harris
#65. He sees very clearly - he damn sure sees through me. It's hard to accept that someone can understand you without wishing you well. At Starling's age it hadn't happened to her much.
Thomas Harris
#66. He could see that he had too many flowers in the room, and must add more to make it come back right again. Too many flowers was too many, but way too many was just right.
Thomas Harris
#67. Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.
Thomas Harris
#68. It would be so nice to be wanted by someone with the courage to get his hat or stay as he damn pleased, and who gave her credit for the same. Someone who didn't worry about her.
Thomas Harris
#69. 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.
Thomas Harris
#70. Sometimes Crawford's tone reminded Starling of the know-it-all caterpillar in Lewis Caroll.
Thomas Harris
#71. Footsteps out of the room. The side and rattle of a kitchen drawer. Lounds had covered many murders committed in kitchens where things are handy. Police reporting can change forever your view of kitchens ...
Thomas Harris
#72. 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?
Thomas Harris
#73. 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.
Thomas Harris
#74. 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.
Thomas Harris
#75. 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.
Thomas Harris
#76. WHEN STARLING was a child she moved from a clapboard house that groaned in the wind to the solid redbrick of the Lutheran Orphanage.
Thomas Harris
#77. I say what I mean. Would you like it better if I said 'I'm glad you find me so.' That would be a little fancier, and equally true.
Thomas Harris
#78. The intimacy of the detail - why The Silence of the Lambs is quite possibly the Thriller Writer's bible.
Thomas Harris
#79. Oh wrangling schools, that search what fire
Shall burn this world had none the wit
Unto this knowledge to aspire
That this her fever might be it?
I'm so sorry about Bella, Jack.
Thomas Harris
#80. But when Krendler's volume became intrusive, Dr. Lecter retrieved his crossbow from a corner.
Thomas Harris
#81. When I couldn't speak I was not drawn into silence, silence captured me.
Thomas Harris
#82. I'm not sure you get wiser as you get older, Starling, but you do learn to dodge a certain amount of hell.
Thomas Harris
#83. The enemy inside Graham agreed with any accusation.
Thomas Harris
#84. Crawford saw that in this place Starling was heir to the granny women, to the wise women, the herb healers, the stalwart country women who have always done the needful, who keep the watch and when the watch is over, wash and dress the country dead.
Thomas Harris
#85. 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
Thomas Harris
#86. 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.
Thomas Harris
#89. When the Fox hears the Rabbit scream he comes a-runnin', but not to help.
Thomas Harris
#91. Crawford, ever wary of desire, knew how badly he wanted to be wise. He knew that a middle-aged man can be so desperate for wisdom he may try to make some up, and how deadly that can be to a youngster who believes him.
Thomas Harris
#92. 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.
Thomas Harris
#93. 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?
Thomas Harris
#94. How seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home.
Thomas Harris
#95. 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.
Thomas Harris
#97. I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.
Thomas Harris
#98. He could feed the caterpillar, he could whisper through the chrysalis; what hatched out followed its own nature and was beyond him.
Thomas Harris
#99. Mischa, we take comfort in knowing there is no God. That you are not enslaved in Heaven, made to kiss God's ass forever. What you have is better than Paradise. You have blessed oblivion. I miss you every day.
Thomas Harris
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