Top 85 Quotes & Sayings by 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.

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

Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti

… 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

Let me tell you about my day. I get up at 8 o'clock in the morning. At 8:30 am, I leave the house and I arrive at my office at 8:37. I stay in the office until 2 o'clock in the afternoon. I get in my Porsche and I'm home at 2:03 because the one-way streets make it faster for me to drive. And between 8:36 am and 2 pm, I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

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

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

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.

Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.

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...

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

How seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home.

Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.

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.

Nothing made me happen. I happened.

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

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.

It's hard to have anything isn't it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it. This is a damn slippery planet.

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.

I have no interest in understanding sheep, only eating them.

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

I am the dragon, and you call me insane.

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.

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

You will not persuade me with appeals to my intellectual vanity.

In making friends, she was wary of people who foster dependency and feed on it. She had been involved with a few--the blind attract them, and they are the enemy.

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.

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.

We can only learn so much and live.

Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place.

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

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

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.

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

The tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.

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

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.

Because it's his bad luck to be the best.

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

One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.

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

There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named -- the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.

It's hard... to shake off something that's already under your skin.

Allegra Pazzi: Dr. Fell, do you believe a man could become so obsessed with a woman, from a single encounter? Hannibal Lecter: 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?

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.

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

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.

Intense fear comes in waves; the body can't stand it for long at a time.

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?

He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.