Top 200 Thomas Harris Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “How seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home.”

— Thomas Harris

52. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

54. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

57. “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

58. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

61. “Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.”

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

63. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

65. “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

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

70. “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

71. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

73. “Ready when you are Sergeant Pempbry.”

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

82. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

84. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

86. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

88. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

91. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

93. “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

94. “When you show the odd flash of contextual intelligence, I forget your generation can’t read, Clarice. – Hannibal Lecter.”

— Thomas Harris

95. “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

96. “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

97. “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

98. “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

99. “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

100. “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