Thomas Harris > Quotes

“I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“When the Fox hears the Rabbit scream he comes a-runnin', but not to help.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“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

“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, The Silence of the Lambs

“Nothing made me happen. I happened.

Hannibal Lecter”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“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, The Silence of the Lambs

“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, Red Dragon

“We can only learn so much and live.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“It rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it is told. ”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“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, Red Dragon

“You would think such a day would tremble to begin . . .”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“Hello Clarice...”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“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.”
― Thomas Harris

“The advantage of beating a mute is he can't tell on you.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal Rising

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

“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, Hannibal

“Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

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

“Lecter is so lucid, so perceptive; he's trained in psychiatry... and he's a mass murderer.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“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, The Silence of the Lambs

“… 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, Hannibal Rising

“I am the dragon, and you call me insane.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“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.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

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

“Shiloh isn’t haunted – men are haunted.
Shiloh doesn’t care.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“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, Red Dragon

“Back at his chair he cannot remember what he was reading. He feels the books beside him to find the one that is warm.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn't it?”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“Ready when you are Sergeant Pempbry.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“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, Red Dragon

“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, Red Dragon

“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, Hannibal

“It occured to Starling how much Roden would benefit from an elbow smash in the hinge of his jaw.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“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, The Silence of the Lambs

“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?”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

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

“... 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, The Silence of the Lambs

“M for Mischa.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal Rising

“In the Green Machine there is no mercy; we make mercy, manufacture it in parts that have overgrown our basic reptile brain. There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“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, Red Dragon

“They sat in a row on the couches and in wheelchairs listening to the radio, their faded eyes fixed on the fish or on nothing or something they saw a long time ago.
Francis would always remember the shuffle of feet on linoleum in the hot and buzzing day, and the smell of stewed tomatoes and cabbage from the kitchen, the smell of old people like meat wrappers dried in the sun, and always the radio.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“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.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal Rising

“I expect most psychiatrists have a patient or two they'd like to refer to me.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.”
― Thomas Harris

“In the 1980's, the Golden Age of Terrorism, procedures....”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“He moves smoothly and slowly, carrying his concentration like a brimming cup.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon