Quotes from Thomas Harris

Chilton went behind Dr. Lecter and, with a glance at the camera, undid the straps and removed the mask with a flourish. "Senator Martin, meet Dr. Hannibal Lecter." Seeing what Dr. Chilton had done for showmanship frightened Senator Martin as much as anything that had happened since her daughter disappeared. Any confidence she might have had in Chilton's judgment was replaced with the cold fear that he was a fool. She'd have to wing it.

Do you dream much, Will?

Crawford, ever wary of desire, knew how badly he wanted to be wise. 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. So he spoke carefully, and only of things he knew.

You know what he said? Bloom said maybe he's trying to stop.

It sped her toward the idea that Dr. Lecter's taste for rarefied things, things in a small market, might be the monster's dorsal fin, cutting the surface and making him visible.

It seemed a very short distance to the outside. This was only a building, there were only five doors between Lecter and the outside. He had the absurd feeling that Lecter had walked out with him. He stopped outside the entrance and looked around him, assuring himself that he was alone.

Bella, I love you, kid," he said in case she could hear. Fear brushed the walls of his chest, circling inside him like a bat in a house. Then he got hold of it. He wanted to get something for her, anything, but he did not want her to feel him let go of her hand.

It was as though committing murders had purged him of lesser rudeness.

Hannibal could smell him.

What, the Star Wars?" Mapp said. "If the aliens are trying to control Buffalo Bill's thoughts from another planet, Senator Martin can protect him—is that the pitch?" Starling nodded. "A lot of paranoid schizophrenics have that specific hallucination—alien control. If that's the way Bill's wired, maybe this approach could bring him out. It's a damn good shot, though, and she stood up there and fired it, didn't she?

He snapped some icicles off a branch to make me a martini. He came back to the car, long legs lifting high in the snow, and there was snow in his hair and on his eyelashes and I remembered that I love him. It felt like something breaking with a little pain and spilling warm. I hope the parka

Dr. Lecter took off Krendler's runner's headband as you would remove the rubber band from a tin of caviar.

Two things to begin with. First, we go on the premise that Dr. Lecter really knows something concrete. second, we remember that Lecter looks only for the fun. Never forget fun.

He liked the Leedses. He was sorry that he had been to the morgue. He thought the madman who visited them might have liked them too. But the madman would like them better the way they were now.

Spoken like a Protestant.

Graham switched on the lights and bloodstains shouted at him from the walls, from the mattress and the floor. The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room full of dark stains drying. Graham sat on the floor until his head was quiet. Still, still, be still.

Pity Catherine Martin won't ever see the sun again. The sun's a mattress fire her God died in, Clarice.

Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?

When I said that Mercy stood Within the borders of the wood, I meant the lenient beast with claws And bloody swift-dispatching jaws. —LAWRENCE SPINGARN

it would hold among its molecules the vibrations of all the conversations ever held in its presence. All the exchanges, the petty irritations, the deadly revelations, the flat announcements of disaster, the grunts and poetry of love. Sit

He cleared his throat. "One good thing about the range, Starling, is there's no politics out there." "No?" "You were right to secure that garage up at Baltimore there. You worried about the TV?

And then he realized that he loved the eagle better than the sheep and that he always would and that, because he did, because it was in him to do it, he could never be perfect in the sight of God.

WHEN STARLING was a child she moved from a clapboard house that groaned in the wind to the solid redbrick of the Lutheran Orphanage.

Monsters know when they are recognized, just as bores do.