Thomas Harris Quotes
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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.
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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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Because it's his bad luck to be the best.
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I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti
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You cant reduce me to a set of influences.
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Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.
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Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to it.
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We can only learn so much and live.
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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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Life's too slippery for books, Clarice; anger appears as lust, lupus presents as hives.
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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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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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I am the dragon, and you call me insane.
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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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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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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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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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The advantage of beating a mute is he can't tell on you.
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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.
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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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It's hard... to shake off something that's already under your skin.
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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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You would think such a day would tremble to begin . . .