Thomas Harris

“You know how cats do. They hide to die. Dogs come home.”

“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.”

“Lecter sits in his armchair with a big pad of butcher paper doing calculations. The pages are filled with the symbols both of astrophysics and particle physics. There are repeated efforts with the symbols of string theory. The few mathematicians who could follow him might say his equations begin brilliantly and then decline, doomed by wishful thinking. Dr. Lecter wants time to reverse — no longer should increasing entropy mark the direction of time. He wants increasing order to point the way”.”

“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.”

“You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up.”

“Es una comadreja de cementerio. Vive purgando sus crímenes en una caja torácica, entre las hojas secas de un corazón.Starling parpadeó para alejar ese pensamiento.”

“He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.”

“En este extraño mundo, esta mitad del mundo que ahora está a oscuras, tengo que perseguir a un ser que se alimenta de lágrimas”

“[T]here is no consensus in the psychiatric community that Dr. Lecter should be termed a man. He has long been regarded by his professional peers in psychiatry, many of whom fear his acid pen in the professional journals, as something entirely Other. For convenience, they term him “monster”.”

“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.”

“Are you looking for sympathy? You'll find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis”

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

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

“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...”

“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 tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.”

“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.”

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

“He knew that a middle-aged man can be so desperate for wisdom he may try to make some up, and how deadly that can be to a youngster who believes him.”

“And then, the last words Raspail ever said: 'I wonder why my parents didn't kill me before I was old enough to fool them.'The slender handle of the stiletto wiggled as Raspail's spiked heart tried to keep beating, and Dr Lecter said, 'Looks like a straw down a doodlebug hole, doesn't it?' but it was too late for Raspail to answer.”

“Зло порождается страстью.Hannibal Lecter”

“Страх быть примитивной – вот ваше единственное богатство.”

“I'm not sure you get wiser as you get older, Starling, but you do learn to dodge a certain amount of hell.”

“One quality in a person doesn't rule out any other quality. They can exist side by side, good and terrible. Socrates said it a lot better.”

“Pachelbel’s Canon filled the sun-drowned room where they learned each other and even then the fear flickered across him like an osprey’s shadow: This is too good to live for long.”

“The lambs will stop for now. But, Clarice, you judge yourself with all the mercy of the dungeon scales at Threave; you'll have to earn it again and again, the blessed silence. Because it's the plight that drives you, seeing the plight, and the plight will not end, ever.”

“Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to it.”

“Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.”

“Silence can mock.”

“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.”

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

“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?”

“Just before nightfall, Hannibal approached Lecter castle through the woods. As he looked at his home, his feelings remained curiously flat; 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 expect most psychiatrists have a patient or two they'd like to refer to me.”

“When you are writing a novel, you aren't making it up. The story is already there. You just have to find it.”

“Baby needs a new pair of shoes,' he said. 'My baby doesn't need any shoes.”

“The intimacy of the detail - why The Silence of the Lambs is quite possibly the Thriller Writer's bible.”

“But the face on the pillow, rosy in the firelight, is certainly that of Clarice Starling, and she sleeps deeply, sweetly, in the silence of the lambs.”

“Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.”

“... the washing machine's rhythm was like a giant heartbeat, and the rush of its waters was what the unborn hear- our last memory of peace.”

“Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn't it?”

“In the Green Machine there is no mercy; we make mercy, manufacture it in parts that have overgrown our basic reptile brain. There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us.”

“M for Mischa.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“… 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.”

“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 would be so nice to be wanted by someone with the courage to get his hat or stay as he damn pleased, and who gave her credit for the same. Someone who didn't worry about her.”