Top 100 Thomas Harris Quotes
#1. What was always interesting about Thomas Harris' books is they were a wonderful hybridization of a crime thriller and a horror movie.
Bryan Fuller
#2. I read 'Red Dragon' back in high school. I love Thomas Harris' approach to the crime thriller that crossed over into horror in a way that nobody really tapped into.
Bryan Fuller
#3. Let's do, let's get some handles. I don't know why I'm talking about this stuff. Look, I love you and I miss you and you're doing the right thing. It's costing you too, I know that. I'm here and I'll be here whenever you come home, or I'll meet you anywhere, anytime. That's what.
Thomas Harris
#4. Who are you anyway?" Krendler said. "You're not Starling. You've got the spot on your face, but you're not Starling.
Thomas Harris
#5. 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
#6. Barney did not reply. He looked at Krendler as though the left and right hemispheres of Krendler's brain were two dogs stuck together.
Thomas Harris
#8. 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.
Thomas Harris
#9. Dr. Lecter took off Krendler's runner's headband as you would remove the rubber band from a tin of caviar.
Thomas Harris
#10. Fear comes from the imagination, it's a penalty, it's the price for imagination
Thomas Harris
#11. He was a person who agreed with everything his victim said before he killed him.
Thomas Harris
#12. Crawford was home for a month from the hospital, the chest pains came again in the night. Instead of calling an ambulance and going through it all again, he chose simply to roll over to the solace of his late wife's side of the bed.
Thomas Harris
#13. 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
#14. You know how cats do. They hide to die. Dogs come home.
Thomas Harris
#15. 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
#16. On a related subject, Signore Pazzi, I must confess to you: I'm giving serious thought to eating your wife.
Thomas Harris
#17. Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to it.
Thomas Harris
#18. I love myself that much and I will never apologize to you.
Thomas Harris
#19. 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
#20. I would not have had that happen to you. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.
Thomas Harris
#21. Before his Becoming, he would not have dared any of this. Now he realized he could do anything. Anything. Anything.
Thomas Harris
#23. The first step in the development of taste is to be willing to to credit your own opinion.
Thomas Harris
#24. In the 1980's, the Golden Age of Terrorism, procedures ...
Thomas Harris
#25. When the fox hears a rabbit scream, he comes running, but not to help.
Thomas Harris
#26. 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
#27. He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.
Thomas Harris
#28. When you are writing a novel, you aren't making it up. The story is already there. You just have to find it.
Thomas Harris
#29. blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there.
Thomas A. Harris
#30. Variously weighted with lies, guns, and groceries, the three of them were a small and solemn troop.
Thomas Harris
#32. This was a holiday and killing Grentz was preferable to skiing. The
Thomas Harris
#33. I collect church collapses, recreationally. Did you see the recent one in Sicily? Marvelous! The facade fell on sixty-five grandmothers at a special mass. Was that evil? If so, who did it? If he's up there, he just loves it, Officer Starling. Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place.
Thomas Harris
#34. Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of influences.
Thomas Harris
#35. 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
#37. Lecter is so lucid, so perceptive; he's trained in psychiatry ... and he's a mass murderer.
Thomas Harris
#38. The world will not be this way within the reach of my arm.
Thomas Harris
#40. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas).
Sam Harris
#42. 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
#43. 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.
Thomas Harris
#44. Starling looked at Crawford steadily, but she was too still. "Hannibal the Cannibal," she said.
Thomas Harris
#45. I'll confess it is pleasant to look at you asleep. You're quite beautiful, Clarice.
Thomas Harris
#46. Pictures ... flashed on her in sudden color, too much color, shocking color, the color that leaps out of black when lightning strikes at night.
Thomas Harris
#47. ... 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.
Thomas Harris
#48. 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
Thomas Harris
#49. The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room.
Thomas Harris
#50. Through the Adult the little person can begin to tell the difference between life as it was taught and demonstrated to him (Parent), life as he felt it or wished it or fantasied it (Child), and life as he figures it out by himself (Adult).
Thomas A. Harris
#51. You would think such a day would tremble to begin ...
Thomas Harris
#52. ...she shot him in the face as he slid down the door facing and she shot him in the face as he sat on the floor and she ran to him and shot him twice in the face as he sprawled against the wall, scalp down to his chin and his hair on fire.
Thomas Harris
#53. 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
#54. Intense fear comes in waves; the body can't stand it for long at a time.
Thomas Harris
#55. We assign a moment to decision, to dignify the process as a timely result of rational and conscious thought. But decisions are made of kneaded feelings; they are more often a lump than a sum.
Thomas Harris
#56. 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.
Thomas Harris
#57. This is the essence of all games. Games are a way of using time for people who cannot bear the stroking starvation of withdrawal and yet whose NOT OK position makes the ultimate form of relatedness, intimacy, impossible.
Thomas A. Harris
#58. 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
#59. If I saw you everyday forever, I would remember this time.
Thomas Harris
#60. 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 ...
Thomas Harris
#61. One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.
Thomas Harris
#62. Show Dr. Princi your teeth. That's right, let's see 'em all. Christ, Sparks, is that your tongue or are you swallowing a squirrel? Keep moving -
Thomas Harris
#63. 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.
Thomas Harris
#64. The damp floor of the Internet sprouted Lecter theories like toadstools and sightings of the doctor rivaled those of Elvis in number.
Thomas Harris
#65. Every person is worth your time, Hannibal. If at first appearance a person seems dull, then look harder, look into him.
Thomas Harris
#66. 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
#67. Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.
Thomas Harris
#68. They had me taking the fall for the raid, Mr. Crawford. For Evelda Drumgo's death, all of it. They were like hyenas and then suddenly it stopped and they slunk away. Something drove them off." "Maybe you have an angel, Starling." "Maybe I do. What did it cost you, Mr. Crawford?
Thomas Harris
#69. God's creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again.
Thomas Harris
#70. 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.
Thomas Harris
#71. Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn't it?
Thomas Harris
#72. 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
#73. Don't think you can persuade me with appeals to my intellectual vanity.
Thomas Harris
#74. I'm going to cut you loose. With all due respect, Doctor, if you fuck with me I'll shoot you dead, here and now. Do you understand that?"- Clarice
"Perfectly."- Hannibal Lecter
"Do right and you'll live through this." -Clarice
Thomas Harris
#75. 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
#76. 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.
Thomas Harris
#77. He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart.
Thomas Harris
#78. 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
#79. He moves smoothly and slowly, carrying his concentration like a brimming cup.
Thomas Harris
#80. 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
#81. He follows several trains of thought at once, without distraction from any, and one of the trains is always for his own amusement.
Thomas Harris
#82. There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named
the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.
Thomas Harris
#83. 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
#84. When you feel strain, keep your mouth shut if you can.
Thomas Harris
#85. Sanity and apparent rationality are not the same, comrade.
Thomas Harris
#86. Are you looking for sympathy? You'll find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis
Thomas Harris
#87. 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
#88. The advantage of beating a mute is he can't tell on you.
Thomas Harris
#89. Funerals often make us want sex - it's one in the eye for death.
Thomas Harris
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. It occured to Starling how much Roden would benefit from an elbow smash in the hinge of his jaw.
Thomas Harris
#93. 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
#94. 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.
Thomas Harris
#95. Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.
Thomas Harris
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. Almost every place has a moment of the day, an angle and intensity of light, in which it looks its best. When you're stuck someplace, you learn that time and you look forward to it.
Thomas Harris
#99. You didn't draw a freak. You drew a man with a freak on his back. Nothing wrong with you, kid.
Thomas Harris
#100. 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
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