Top 200 Thomas Harris Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.”

— Thomas Harris

52. “Dolarhyde bore screams as a sculptor bears dust from the beaten stone.”

— Thomas Harris

53. “I know what you’re afraid of. It’s not pain, or solitude. It’s indignity you can’t stand, Hannibal, you’re like a cat that way.”

— Thomas Harris

54. “In making friends, she was wary of people who foster dependency and feed on it. She had been involved with a few – the blind attract them, and they are the enemy.”

— Thomas Harris

55. “Avarice is not unknown in Italy, and Rinaldo Pazzi had imbibed plenty with his native air. But his natural acquisitiveness and ambition had been whetted in America, where every influence is felt more quickly, including the death of Jehovah and the incumbency of Mammon. When.”

— Thomas Harris

56. “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.”

— Thomas Harris

57. “Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.”

— Thomas Harris

58. “On a related subject, Signore Pazzi, I must confess to you: I’m giving serious thought to eating your wife.”

— Thomas Harris

59. “Intense fear comes in waves; the body can’t stand it for long at a time.”

— Thomas Harris

60. “Waste and stupidity get you the worst, that’s what he said. Use this time and it’ll 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.”

— Thomas Harris

61. “I love myself that much and I will never apologize to you.”

— Thomas Harris

62. “I’m not sure you get wiser as you get older, Starling, but you do learn to dodge a certain amount of hell. We can dodge some right there.”

— Thomas Harris

63. “The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room.”

— Thomas Harris

64. “Ready when you are Sergeant Pempbry.”

— Thomas Harris

65. “He’s a cemetery mink. He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart.”

— Thomas Harris

66. “Lecter is so lucid, so perceptive; he’s trained in psychiatry... and he’s a mass murderer.”

— Thomas Harris

67. “Since the partial answer to his prayer, Hannibal Lecter had not been bothered by any considerations of deity, other than to recognize how his own modest predation paled beside those of God, who is in irony matchless and in wanton malice beyond measure.”

— Thomas Harris

68. “Good nutrition has given you some length of bone, but you’re not more than one generation out of the mines Officer Starling.”

— Thomas Harris

69. “He viewed his own mentality as grotesque but useful, like a chair made of antlers. There was nothing he could do about it.”

— Thomas Harris

70. “Out of the cosmic hangover the Smithsonian leaves came her last thought and a coda for her day: Over this odd world, this half the world that’s dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.”

— Thomas Harris

71. “Water flying, a mocking rainbow of God’s Promise in the spray, sparkling banner over the work of His blind hammer. No holes in this man-child that Starling could see. On the speakers “Macarena” pounding, a strobe light going off and off and off until Hare dragged the photographer away.”

— Thomas Harris

72. “Crawford began to underline. “If you assume when I send you on a job, Starling, you can make an ass out of u and me both.”

— Thomas Harris

73. “I collect church collapses, recreationally. Did you see the recent one in Sicily? Marvelous! The facade fell on sixty-five grandmothers at a special mass. Was that evil? If so, who did it? If he’s up there, he just loves it, Officer Starling. Typhoid and swans – it all comes from the same place.”

— Thomas Harris

74. “His empty hands hanging palms forward at his sides, he stood at the window looking to the empty east. He did not look for dawn; east was only the way the window faced.”

— Thomas Harris

75. “It’s oh-two hundred Zulu all over the world, my friend,” Kabakov said. “We never close.”

— Thomas Harris

76. “Molly was the same height as Graham, five feet ten inches. A level kiss in public carries a pleasant jolt, possibly because level kisses usually are exchanged in bed.”

— Thomas Harris

77. “It’s indignity you can’t stand, Hannibal, you’re like a cat that way.”

— Thomas Harris

78. “When you feel strain, keep your mouth shut if you can.”

— Thomas Harris

79. “He sees very clearly – he damn sure sees through me. It’s hard to accept that someone can understand you without wishing you well. At Starling’s age it hadn’t happened to her much.”

— Thomas Harris

80. “Sometimes Crawford’s tone reminded Starling of the know-it-all caterpillar in Lewis Caroll.”

— Thomas Harris

81. “When you were so depressed after you shot Mr. Garrett Jacob Hobbs to death, it wasn’t the act that got you down, was it? Really, didn’t you feel so bad because killing him felt so good? Think about it, but don’t worry about it. Why shouldn’t it feel good? It must feel good to God – He does it all the time, and are we not made in His image?”

— Thomas Harris

82. “Good-bye Clarice. Will you let me know if ever the lambs stop screaming?” “Yes.” Pembry was taking her arm. It was go or fight him. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll tell you.” “Do you promise?“”Yes.”

— Thomas Harris

83. “I’m doing one of three things: I’m writing. I’m staring out the window. Or I’m writhing on the floor.”

— Thomas Harris

84. “Hannibal had entered his heart’s long winter. He slept soundly and was not visited in dreams as humans are.”

— Thomas Harris

85. “He viewed his own mentality as grotesque but useful, like a chair made of antlers.”

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

87. “Sanity and apparent rationality are not the same, comrade.”

— Thomas Harris

88. “Far beneath the rusty Baltimore dawn, stirrings in the maximum security ward. Down where it is never dark the tormented sense beginning day as oysters in a barrel open to their lost tide. God’s creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again and the ravers cleared their throats.”

— Thomas Harris

89. “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.”

— Thomas Harris

90. “Your agency called this office and got me assigned to help you on this raid. I gave Evelda Drumgo two chances to surrender. She was holding a MAC 10 under the baby blanket. She had already shot John Brigham. I wish she had given up. She didn’t. She shot me. I shot her. She’s dead. You might want to check your tape counter right.”

— Thomas Harris

91. “I found, and find, the scrutiny of Dr. Lecter uncomfortable, intrusive, like the humming of your thoughts when they x-ray your head.”

— Thomas Harris

92. “Good morning,” he said, as though he had answered the door. His cultured voice has a slight metallic rasp beneath it, possibly from disuse. Dr Lecter’s eyes are maroon and they reflect the light in pinpoints of red. Sometimes the points of light seem to fly like sparks to his center. His eyes held Starling whole.”

— Thomas Harris

93. “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.”

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

95. “Evil’s just destructive? Then storms are evil, if it’s that simple. And we have fire, and there there’s hail. Underwriters lump it all under ‘Acts of God.”

— Thomas Harris

96. “The enemy inside Graham agreed with any accusation.”

— Thomas Harris

97. “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.”

— Thomas Harris

98. “How do you behave when you know the conventional honors are dross? When you have come to believe with Marcus Aurelius that the opinion of future generations will be worth no more than the opinion of the current one? Is it possible to behave well then? Desirable to behave well then?”

— Thomas Harris

99. “I’ll confess it is pleasant to look at you asleep. You’re quite beautiful, Clarice.”

— Thomas Harris

100. “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.”

— Thomas Harris