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.

I would not have had that happen to you. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.

How seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home.

I'll confess it is pleasant to look at you asleep. You're quite beautiful, Clarice.

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...

The advantage of beating a mute is he can't tell on you.

We can only learn so much and live.