Quotes from Thomas Harris

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

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

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 first step in the development of taste is to be willing to to credit your own opinion.

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.

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

Don't think you can persuade me with appeals to my intellectual vanity.

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

We assign a moment to decision, to dignify the process as a timely result of rational and conscious thought. But decisions are made of kneaded feelings; they are more often a lump than a sum.

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?

There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us.

He's a monster. I think of him as one of those pitiful things that are born in hospitals from time to time. They feed it, and keep it warm, but they don't put it on the machines and it dies. Lecter is the same way in his head, but he looks normal and nobody could tell.

She wanted to go inside. She wanted to go in, wanting it as we want to jump from balconies, as the glint of the rails tempts us when we hear the approaching train.

It's hard and ugly to know someone can understand you without even liking you.

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.

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

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.

We don't begin to covet with imagined things. Coveting is a very literal sin–we begin to covet with tangibles, we begin with what we see every day.

She was charming way a cub is charming, a small cub that will grow up to be like one of the big cats. One you can't play with later

To write a novel, you begin with what you can see and then you add what came before and what came after. ...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.

The world will not be this way within the reach of my arm.

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.

Almost every place has a moment of the day, an angle and intensity of light, in which it looks its best. When you're stuck someplace, you learn that time and you look forward to it.

He looked up and saw her and his breath stopped in his throat. His hands stopped too, still spread above the keyboard. Harpsichord notes do not carry, and in the sudden quiet of the drawing room they both heard him take his next breath.