Best 95 quotes of Thomas Harris on MyQuotes

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.

Allegra Pazzi: Dr. Fell, do you believe a man could become so obsessed with a woman, from a single encounter? Hannibal Lecter: 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?

And be grateful. Our scars have the power to remind us that the past was real.

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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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...

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.

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

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.

He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.

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

Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.

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

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.

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

I have no interest in understanding sheep, only eating them.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

… 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.

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.

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

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.

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

It's hard... to shake off something that's already under your skin.

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

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.

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

Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.

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

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.

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

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

Ready when you are, Sergeant Pempbry.

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

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.

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