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On a related subject, Signore Pazzi, I must confess to you: I'm giving serious thought to eating your wife.
Thomas Harris -
There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named -- the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.
Thomas Harris
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We routinely leave our small children in day care among strangers. At the same time, in our guilt we evince paranoia about strangers and foster fear in children.
Thomas Harris -
Intense fear comes in waves; the body can't stand it for long at a time.
Thomas Harris -
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.
Thomas Harris -
The most stable elements, Clarice, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver. Between iron and silver. I think that is appropriate for you.
Thomas Harris -
You will not persuade me with appeals to my intellectual vanity.
Thomas Harris -
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
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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.
Thomas Harris -
And be grateful. Our scars have the power to remind us that the past was real.
Thomas Harris -
Funerals often make us want sex-it's one in the eye for death.
Thomas Harris -
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 -
The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room.
Thomas Harris -
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
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I would not have had that happen to you. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.
Thomas Harris -
He moves smoothly and slowly, carrying his concentration like a brimming cup.
Thomas Harris -
Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.
Thomas Harris -
Gratitude’s got a short half-life, Clarice.
Thomas Harris -
I love myself that much and I will never apologize to you.
Thomas Harris -
Whenever feasible, one should always try to eat the rude.
Thomas Harris
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I expect most psychiatrists have a patient or two they'd like to refer to me.
Thomas Harris -
You know how cats do. They hide to die. Dogs come home.
Thomas Harris -
When Will Graham could open his right eye, he saw the clock and knew where he was- an intensive-care unit. He knew to watch the clock. Its movement assured him that this was passing, would pass. That's what it was there for.
Thomas Harris