Thomas Harris Quotes
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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?
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Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place.
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We can only learn so much and live.
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Because it's his bad luck to be the best.
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You cant reduce me to a set of influences.
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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.
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Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to it.
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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.
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Life's too slippery for books, Clarice; anger appears as lust, lupus presents as hives.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.
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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.
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I found, and find, the scrutiny of Dr. Lecter uncomfortable, intrusive, like the humming of your thoughts when they x-ray your head.
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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?
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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.
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It occured to Starling how much Roden would benefit from an elbow smash in the hinge of his jaw.
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I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti
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The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.
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You would think such a day would tremble to begin . . .
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Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.
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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...
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It's hard to have anything isn't it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it. This is a damn slippery planet.