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.

He moves smoothly and slowly, carrying his concentration like a brimming cup.

Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.

I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

Life's too slippery for books, Clarice; anger appears as lust, lupus presents as hives.

We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the cafe curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we're frightened in the face of Doom.

Because it's his bad luck to be the best.