Thomas Harris Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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 -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“I'm giving serious thought into eating yor wife†- Hannibal Lecter”
-- Thomas Harris -
“When the Fox hears the Rabbit scream he comes a-runnin', but not to help.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“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.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“The tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“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 -
“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?”
-- Thomas Harris -
“How seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn't it?”
-- Thomas Harris -
“We can only learn so much and live.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“… 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.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“Back at his chair he cannot remember what he was reading. He feels the books beside him to find the one that is warm.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“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.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“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 -
“Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to it.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“It occured to Starling how much Roden would benefit from an elbow smash in the hinge of his jaw.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“I would not have had that happen to you. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“Good-bye Clarice. Will you let me know if ever the lambs stop screaming?" "Yes." Pembry was taking her arm. It was go or fight him. "Yes," she said. "I'll tell you." "Do you promise?""Yes.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“Gratitude’s got a short half-life, Clarice.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“Lecter is so lucid, so perceptive; he's trained in psychiatry... and he's a mass murderer.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named -- the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“On a related subject, Signore Pazzi, I must confess to you: I'm giving serious thought to eating your wife.”
-- Thomas Harris -
“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.”
-- Thomas Harris
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