Thomas Harris > Quotes

“When the Fox hears the Rabbit scream he comes a-runnin', but not to help.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“Nothing made me happen. I happened.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“The tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn't it?”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“It's fear, Jack. The man deals with a huge amount of fear.'
Because he got hurt?'
No, not entirely. Fear comes with imagination, it's a penalty, it's the price of imagination.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“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.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“It's hard to have anything isn't it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it. This is a damn slippery planet.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“She didn't give a damn about some of them, but she had grown to learn that inattention can be a stratagem to avoid pain, and that it is often misread as shallowness and indifference.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“Are you looking for sympathy? You'll find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal Rising

“Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“I collect church collapses, recreationally. Did you see the recent one in Sicily? Marvelous! The facade fell on sixty-five grandmothers at a special mass. Was that evil? If so, who did it? If he's up there, he just loves it, Officer Starling. Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“If I saw you everyday forever, I would remember this time.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“We live in a primitive time—don’t we, Will?—neither savage nor wise. Half measures are the curse of it. Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“Silence can mock.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“We can only learn so much and live.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“I'm not sure you get wiser as you get older, Starling, but you do learn to dodge a certain amount of hell.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“God's creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“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, Hannibal

“Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of influences.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“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, Hannibal

“Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“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.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“Graham had a lot of trouble with taste. Often his thoughts were not tasty. There were no effective partitions in his mind. What he saw and learned touched everything else he knew. Some of the combinations were hard to live with. But he could not anticipate them, could not block and repress. His learned values of decency and propriety tagged along, shocked at his associations, appalled at his dreams; sorry that in the bone arena of his skull there were no forts for what he loved. His associations came at the speed of light. His value judgments were at the pace of a responsive reading. They could never keep up and direct his thinking. He viewed his own mentality as grotesque but useful, like a chair made of antlers. There was nothing he could do about it.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“Dr. Fell, do you believe a man could become so obsessed with a woman, from a single encounter?
Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for her and find nourishment in the very sight of her? I think so. But would she see through the bars of his plight and ache for him?”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to it.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs