Thomas Harris Quotes

When the Fox hears the Rabbit scream he comes a-runnin', but not to help.

… It is not healing to see your childhood home, but it helps you measure whether you are broken, and how and why, assuming you want to know.

I'm giving serious thought into eating yor wife” - Hannibal Lecter

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.

Shiloh isn’t haunted – men are haunted. Shiloh doesn’t care.

I expect most psychiatrists have a patient or two they'd like to refer to me.

I think it's easy to mistake understanding for empathy - we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It's hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.

And be grateful. Our scars have the power to remind us that the past was real.

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.

What he has in addition is pure empathy and projection,” Dr. Bloom said. “He can assume your point of view, or mine – and maybe some other points of view that scare and sicken him. It’s an uncomfortable gift, Jack. Perception’s a tool that’s pointed on both ends.

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.

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.

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

I am the dragon, and you call me insane.

I love myself that much and I will never apologize to you.

Lecter is so lucid, so perceptive; he's trained in psychiatry... and he's a mass murderer.

On a related subject, Signore Pazzi, I must confess to you: I'm giving serious thought to eating your wife.

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.

Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.

Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.

Whenever feasible, one should always try to eat the rude.

We can only learn so much and live.

What does he do, Clarice? What is the first and principal thing he does, what need does he serve by killing? He covets. How do we begin to covet? We begin by coveting what we see every day.

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.

God's creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again.

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?

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

When you feel strain, keep your mouth shut if you can.

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.

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

Gratitude’s got a short half-life, Clarice.

You would think such a day would tremble to begin . . .

Ready when you are, Sergeant Pempbry.

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...