Top 200 Thomas Harris Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to it.”

— Thomas Harris

2. “When the Fox hears the Rabbit scream he comes a-runnin’, but not to help.”

— Thomas Harris

3. “Hannibal Lecter: We live in a primitive time – don’t we, Will? – neither savage nor wise. Half measures are the curse of it. Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books.”

— Thomas Harris

4. “Typhoid and swans – it all comes from the same place.”

— Thomas Harris

5. “One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.”

— Thomas Harris

6. “I think 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.”

— Thomas Harris

7. “Primum non nocere. First do no harm.”

— Thomas Harris

8. “I am the dragon, and you call me insane.”

— Thomas Harris

9. “The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.”

— Thomas Harris

10. “The tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.”

— Thomas Harris

11. “Nothing made me happen. I happened.”

— Thomas Harris

12. “The most stable elements, Clarice, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver. Between iron and silver. I think that is appropriate for you.”

— Thomas Harris

13. “It rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it is told.”

— Thomas Harris

14. “Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn’t it?”

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

16. “Hannibal at eighteen was rooting for Mephistopheles and contemptuous of Faust, but he only half-listened to the climax. He was watching and breathing Lady Murasaki...”

— Thomas Harris

17. “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

18. “Silence can mock.”

— Thomas Harris

19. “You cant reduce me to a set of influences.”

— Thomas Harris

20. “I would not have had that happen to you. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.”

— Thomas Harris

21. “Dr. Fell, do you believe a man could become so obsessed with a woman, from a single encounter? Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for her and find nourishment in the very sight of her? I think so. But would she see through the bars of his plight and ache for him?”

— Thomas Harris

22. “Shiloh isn’t haunted – men are haunted. Shiloh doesn’t care.”

— Thomas Harris

23. “Did you ever think, Clarice, why the Philistines don’t understand you? It’s because you are the answer to Samson’s riddle. You are the honey in the lion.”

— Thomas Harris

24. “Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.”

— Thomas Harris

25. “It’s fear, Jack. The man deals with a huge amount of fear.? Because he got hurt?? No, not entirely. Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.”

— Thomas Harris

26. “There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named – the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.”

— Thomas Harris

27. “He moves smoothly and slowly, carrying his concentration like a brimming cup.”

— Thomas Harris

28. “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.”

— Thomas Harris

29. “Life’s too slippery for books, Clarice; anger appears as lust, lupus presents as hives.”

— Thomas Harris

30. “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

31. “It’s hard to have anything isn’t it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it. This is a damn slippery planet.”

— Thomas Harris

32. “Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?”

— Thomas Harris

33. “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

34. “You said that I, who see more than you, am insane. I, who pushed the world so much further than you, am insane. I have dared more than you, I have pressed my unique seal so much deeper in the earth, where it will last longer than your dust... you owe me awe.”

— Thomas Harris

35. “Which do you think, Commendatore? Bowels in or out?”

— Thomas Harris

36. “You know how cats do. They hide to die. Dogs come home.”

— Thomas Harris

37. “Hello Clarice...”

— Thomas Harris

38. “God’s creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again.”

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

40. “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.”

— Thomas Harris

41. “Gratitude’s got a short half-life, Clarice.”

— Thomas Harris

42. “She didn’t give a damn about some of them, but she had grown to learn that inattention can be a stratagem to avoid pain, and that it is often misread as shallowness and indifference.”

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

44. “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.”

— Thomas Harris

45. “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.”

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

47. “We can only learn so much and live.”

— Thomas Harris

48. “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

49. “Over this odd world, this half the world that’s dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.”

— Thomas Harris

50. “He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.”

— Thomas Harris