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.

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

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

The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room.

Back at his chair he cannot remember what he was reading. He feels the books beside him to find the one that is warm.

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.

It rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it is told.