Thomas Harris Quotations

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

Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.

The way, I think, to make that happen is for the (Oktoberfest) leadership team to invite groups and people into the planning. (They'd) open the door to people from those diverse backgrounds.

They say he's a sociopath because they don't know what else to call him. He has some of the characteristics of what they call a sociopath. He has no remorse or guilt at all. And he had the first and worst sign - sadism to animals as a child.

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.

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

Let me tell you about my day. I get up at 8 o'clock in the morning. At 8:30 am, I leave the house and I arrive at my office at 8:37. I stay in the office until 2 o'clock in the afternoon. I get in my Porsche and I'm home at 2:03 because the one-way streets make it faster for me to drive. And between 8:36 am and 2 pm, I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

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

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

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.

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...

Ready when you are Sergeant Pempbry.

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

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.

There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I am the dragon, and you call me insane.

And your dinner for the orchestra officials." "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?

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.

Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.

He moves smoothly and slowly, carrying his concentration like a brimming cup.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Hannibal Lecter: 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.

Funerals often make us want sex-it's one in the eye for death.

I found, and find, the scrutiny of Dr. Lecter uncomfortable, intrusive, like the humming of your thoughts when they x-ray your head.

When you feel strain, keep your mouth shut if you can.

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

You cant reduce me to a set of influences.

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

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

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

You would think such a day would tremble to begin . . .

Because it's his bad luck to be the best.

What he has in addition is pure empathy and projection,” Dr. Bloom said. “He can assume your point of view, or mine – and maybe some other points of view that scare and sicken him. It’s an uncomfortable gift, Jack. Perception’s a tool that’s pointed on both ends.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place.

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

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

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

… 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.

He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.

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

Before Me you are a slug in the sun. You are privy to a great Becoming and you recognize nothing. You are an ant in the after-birth.It is in your nature to do one thing correctly: before Me you rightly tremble. Fear is not what you owe Me, Lounds, you and the other pismires. You owe Me awe.

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

It occurred to Dr. Lecter in the moment that with all his knowledge and intrusion, he could never entirely predict her, or own her at all. He could feed the caterpillar, he could whisper through the chrysalis; what hatched out followed its own nature and was beyond him. He wondered if she had the .45 on her leg beneath the gown. Clarice Starling smiled at him then, the cabochons caught the firelight and the monster was lost in self-congratulation at his own exquisite taste and cunning.

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

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?

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.

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

We can only learn so much and live.

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

Nothing made me happen. I happened.

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

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 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.

We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the cafe curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we're frightened in the face of Doom.

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

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

When the Fox hears the Rabbit scream he comes a-runnin', but not to help.

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.

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.

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.