Quotes from Thomas Harris

Funerals often make us want sex—it's one in the eye for death.

Haven't you ever had people coming over and no time to shop? You have to make do with what's in the fridge, Clarice. May I call you Clarice?

The pudgy one moved his bishop and immediately turned the beetle around and started it trudging back the other way. "If the beetle just cuts across the corner, is time up then?" Starling asked. "Of course time's up then," the pudgy one said loudly, without looking up. "Of course it's up then. How do you play? Do you make him cross the whole board? Who do you play against, a sloth?

They drew the line on dogs at the hospital and wouldn't let the dog in. A fireman, instructed to drop it off at the animal shelter, took it home with him instead.

This is the hardest time, Starling. Use this time and it will temper you. Now's the hardest test - not letting rage and frustration keep you from thinking. It's the core of whether you can command or not. Waste and stupidity will get you the worst.

Who's the subject? The psychiatrist - Dr. Hannibal Lecter, Crawford said. A brief silence follows the name, always, in any civilized gathering.

Who are you anyway?" Krendler said. "You're not Starling. You've got the spot on your face, but you're not Starling.

She found Starling in the warm laundry room, dozing against the slow rump-rump of a washing machine in the smell of bleach and soap and fabric softener. Starling had the psychology background--Mapp's was law--yet 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.

Their idle glances walked on him with many tiny feet.

Sometimes Crawford's tone reminded Starling of the know-it-all caterpillar in Lewis Caroll.

He saw the fireball coming, bouncing on the potholes, trailing smoke and sparks and the flames blown back like wings, disjointed reflections leaping along the shop windows. It veered, struck a parked car and overturned in front of the building, one wheel spinning and flames through the spokes, blazing arms rising in the fighting posture of the burned.

She thought for an instant of her late parents. She wondered if they would be ashamed of her now—just that question, not its pertinence, no qualifications—the way we always ask it.

He told me once that, whenever it was 'feasible,' he preferred to eat the rude. 'Free-range rude,' he called them.

Starling discovered that she had traded feeling frightened for feeling cheap. Of the two, she preferred feeling frightened.

Flog no one else with meat.

Now that ceaseless exposure has calloused us to the lewd and the vulgar, it is instructive to see what still seems wicked to us. What still slaps the clammy flab of our submissive consciousness hard enough to get our attention?

I can tell him what you've said." "He'll ignore it. And Buffalo Bill will go on and on. Wait until he scalps one and see how you like it. Ummmm Ã¢â'¬Â¦ I'll tell you one thing about Buffalo Bill without ever seeing the case, and years from now when they catch him, if they ever do, you'll see that I was right and I could have helped. I could have saved lives. Clarice?

the man to love rarely coincides with the hour of loving.

Starling looked at Crawford steadily, but she was too still. "Hannibal the Cannibal," she said.

sight of Clarice Starling running through the falling leaves on the forest path was well established now in the memory palace of his mind. It is a source of pleasure

Sometimes at night I would leave the lights on in my little house and walk across the flat fields. When I looked back from a distance, the house looked like a boat at sea. And all around me the vast Delta night.

La razón por la que pudo atraparme es porque ambos somos iguales

Suicide was Bloom's mortal enemy.

Good," Mapp said. "That's very good. Eat some crabs. Grab Pilcher and smooch him on his face, go wild.