Thomas Harris
Problem solving is hunting. It is savage pleasure and we are born to it.
Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness, except greed.
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: School
Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.Collection: Fear
When the Fox hears the Rabbit scream he comes a-runnin', but not to help.Collection: Rabbits
The tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.Collection: Tragedy
Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn't it?Collection: Smart
And be grateful. Our scars have the power to remind us that the past was real.Collection: Real
Nothing made me happen. I happened.Collection: Made
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Heart
I'm giving serious thought into eating yor wife” - Hannibal LecterCollection: Giving
One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.Collection: Mind
The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.Collection: Temptation
I have no interest in understanding sheep, only eating them.Collection: Sheep
Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to it.Collection: Hunting
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.Collection: Pain
How seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home.Collection: Home
I expect most psychiatrists have a patient or two they'd like to refer to me.Collection: Two
Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.Collection: Animal
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.Collection: Grandmother
It occurred to Dr. Lecter in the moment that with all his knowledge and intrusion, he could never entirely predict her, or own her at all. He could feed the caterpillar, he could whisper through the chrysalis; what hatched out followed its own nature and was beyond him. He wondered if she had the .45 on her leg beneath the gown. Clarice Starling smiled at him then, the cabochons caught the firelight and the monster was lost in self-congratulation at his own exquisite taste and cunning.Collection: Congratulations
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?Collection: Night
Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.Collection: Lonely
There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named -- the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.Collection: Able
Back at his chair he cannot remember what he was reading. He feels the books beside him to find the one that is warm.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Wrestling
You cant reduce me to a set of influences.Collection: Influence
I would not have had that happen to you. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.Collection: Ugly
I'll confess it is pleasant to look at you asleep. You're quite beautiful, Clarice.Collection: Beautiful
On a related subject, Signore Pazzi, I must confess to you: I'm giving serious thought to eating your wife.Collection: Wife
Funerals often make us want sex-it's one in the eye for death.Collection: Sex
He moves smoothly and slowly, carrying his concentration like a brimming cup.Collection: Moving
Shiloh isn’t haunted – men are haunted. Shiloh doesn’t care.Collection: Men
You will not persuade me with appeals to my intellectual vanity.Collection: Vanity
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.Collection: Doe
I am the dragon, and you call me insane.Collection: Dragons
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.Collection: Slugs
Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.Collection: Dark
Hannibal Lecter: 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.Collection: Wise
It's hard... to shake off something that's already under your skin.Collection: Skins
He sees very clearly - he damn sure sees through me. It's hard to accept that someone can understand you without wishing you well. At Starling's age it hadn't happened to her much.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Quality
Whenever feasible, one should always try to eat the rude.Collection: Rude
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...Collection: Breathing
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.Collection: Sleep
… 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.Collection: Healing
Evil's just destructive? Then storms are evil, if it's that simple. And we have fire, and there there's hail. Underwriters lump it all under 'Acts of God.Collection: Simple