Quotes from Thomas Harris

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.

Fear is not what you owe Me, Lounds, you and the other pismires. You owe Me awe.

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

Footsteps out of the room. The side and rattle of a kitchen drawer. Lounds had covered many murders committed in kitchens where things are handy. Police reporting can change forever your view of kitchens…

If he really Loved Grandmother, he should be the thing to be afraid of in the dark.

No existe misericordia en la Máquina verde; nosotros la creamos, fabricándola en las partes que han superado nuestro elemental cerebro de reptil. No existe el crimen, nosotros lo hemos creado y solo a nosotros nos incumbe.

how seldom we recognize the sounds when the bolt of our fate slides home.

Ralph died," Dolarhyde said. "I don't think he liked it very much.

There was a time when he would have apologized for disturbing the man and never come back to the newsstand. For years he had taken shit unlimited from people. Not anymore.

I wonder why my parents didn't kill me before I was old enough to fool them.

it was Mapp who knew that the washing machine's rhythm was like a great heartbeat and the rush of its waters was what the unborn hear—our last memory of peace.

but when Krendler's volume became intrusive, Dr. Lecter retrieved his crossbow from a corner.

Pazzi and his appendage swinging and spinning before the rough wall of the floodlit palace, jerking in posthumous spasms but not choking, dead, his shadow thrown huge on the wall by the floodlights, swinging with his bowels swinging below him in a shorter, quicker arc, his manhood pointing out of his rent trousers in a death erection.

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.

There was a time when Starling would have deferred to these men. Now they didn't like what she was saying, and she had seen too much to care.

In her way, she was a hard one. Faith in any sort of natural justice was nothing but a night-light; she knew that. Whatever she did, she would end the same way everyone does: flat on her back with a tube in her nose, wondering "Is this all?

There is much honor and more sense in having succeeded with what was left, making something with the damned forty acres and a muddy mule, but you have to be able to see that. No one will tell you.

When I couldn't speak I was not drawn into silence, silence captured me.

Starling knew what the saying was in the service: a federal examiner is someone who arrives at the battlefield after the battle is over and bayonets the wounded.

inattention can be a stratagem to avoid pain, and that it is often misread as shallowness and indifference.

Don't try to impose any pattern or symmetry on this guy. Stay open and let him show you.

IT SEEMED TO SVENKA that Dortlich's father was never going to die. The old man breathed and breathed, two years of breathing while the coffin draped with a tarpaulin waited on sawhorses in Svenka's cramped apartment. It took up most of the parlor. This occasioned a lot of griping by the woman living with Svenka, who pointed out that the coffin's rounded top prevented its use even as a sideboard.

When surrounded by their peers, most men have two sets of reactions—the real ones and those designed for evaluation by their fellows.

You don't even dislike him all the time, hard as that is to believe. Then, if you're lucky, out of the stuff you know, part of it plucks at you, tries to get your attention. Always tell me when something plucks, Starling.