Red Dragon (Hannibal Lecter, #1)

by Thomas Harris

The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room full of dark stains drying.

Graham had a lot of trouble with taste. Often his thoughts were not tasty.

He viewed his own mentality as grotesque but useful, like a chair made of antlers. There was nothing he could do about it.

“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.”

Dolarhyde bore screams as a sculptor bears dust from the beaten stone.

“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.”

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