Top 200 Thomas Harris Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Silence and no lambs screaming.”

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

103. “When Will Graham could open his right eye, he saw the clock and knew where he was- an intensive-care unit. He knew to watch the clock. Its movement assured him that this was passing, would pass. That’s what it was there for.”

— Thomas Harris

104. “Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books.”

— Thomas Harris

105. “I expect most psychiatrists have a patient or two they’d like to refer to me.”

— Thomas Harris

106. “I inked up Lombard and all his Merry Men, major case prints whether they said they had touched her or not. They’re scrubbing their hands and bitching now.”

— Thomas Harris

107. “When I couldn’t speak I was not drawn into silence, silence captured me.”

— Thomas Harris

108. “He told me once that, whenever it was ‘feasible,’ he preferred to eat the rude. ‘Free-range rude,’ he called them.”

— Thomas Harris

109. “In making friends she was ever wary of people who foster dependency and feed on it.”

— Thomas Harris

110. “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.”

— Thomas Harris

111. “Writing novels is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.”

— Thomas Harris

112. “The advantage of beating a mute is he can’t tell on you.”

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

114. “A murder house is ugly to the neighbors, like the face of someone who betrayed them. Only outsiders and children stare.”

— Thomas Harris

115. “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.”

— Thomas Harris

116. “The first step in the development of taste is to be willing to credit your own opinion.”

— Thomas Harris

117. “Death and danger do not have to come with trappings.”

— Thomas Harris

118. “Graham loved the way she turned her head, artlessly giving him her less perfect profile. He could see the pulse in her throat, and remembered suddenly and completely the taste of salt on her skin.”

— Thomas Harris

119. “He was alone because he was Unique.”

— Thomas Harris

120. “Live right behind your eyes. Listen to yourself.”

— Thomas Harris

121. “This was a holiday and killing Grentz was preferable to skiing. The.”

— Thomas Harris

122. “That was where Graham lost his faith in .38’s.”

— Thomas Harris

123. “I thank God for what happened,” Verger said. “It was my salvation. Have you accepted Jesus, Miss Starling? Do you have faith?”

— Thomas Harris

124. “To write a novel, you begin with what you can see and then you add what came before and what came after.”

— Thomas Harris

125. “No. You know – having to look. It’s always bad, but you get so you can function anyway, as long as they’re dead. The hospital, interviews, that’s worse. You have to shake it off and keep on thinking. I don’t believe I could do it now. I could make myself look, but I’d shut down the thinking.”

— Thomas Harris

126. “You think nuts don’t apply to the FBI? We get ’em all the time. A man in a Moe hairpiece applied in St. Louis last week. He had a bazooka, two rockets, and a bearskin shako in his golf bag.” “Did you hire him?”

— Thomas Harris

127. “The damp floor of the Internet sprouted Lecter theories like toadstools and sightings of the doctor rivaled those of Elvis in number.”

— Thomas Harris

128. “Good,” Mapp said. “That’s very good. Eat some crabs. Grab Pilcher and smooch him on his face, go wild.”

— Thomas Harris

129. “It occured to Starling how much Roden would benefit from an elbow smash in the hinge of his jaw.”

— Thomas Harris

130. “He did it because he liked it. Still does. Dr. Lecter is not crazy, in any common way we think of being crazy. He did some hideous things because he enjoyed them. But he can function perfectly when he wants to.”

— Thomas Harris

131. “Suicide was Bloom’s mortal enemy.”

— Thomas Harris

132. “When surrounded by their peers, most men have two sets of reactions – the real ones and those designed for evaluation by their fellows.”

— Thomas Harris

133. “Show Dr. Princi your teeth. That’s right, let’s see ’em all. Christ, Sparks, is that your tongue or are you swallowing a squirrel? Keep moving -.”

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

135. “IT SEEMED TO SVENKA that Dortlich’s father was never going to die. The old man breathed and breathed, two years of breathing while the coffin draped with a tarpaulin waited on sawhorses in Svenka’s cramped apartment. It took up most of the parlor. This occasioned a lot of griping by the woman living with Svenka, who pointed out that the coffin’s rounded top prevented its use even as a sideboard.”

— Thomas Harris

136. “Curious how things can work on you even when you recognize them.”

— Thomas Harris

137. “Because it’s his bad luck to be the best.”

— Thomas Harris

138. “Starling knew what the saying was in the service: a federal examiner is someone who arrives at the battlefield after the battle is over and bayonets the wounded.”

— Thomas Harris

139. “Barney did not reply. He looked at Krendler as though the left and right hemispheres of Krendler’s brain were two dogs stuck together.”

— Thomas Harris

140. “Mixed hungers crossed his face; it was Krendler’s nature to both appreciate Starling’s leg and look for the hamstring.”

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

142. “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.”

— Thomas Harris

143. “They had been in a row, seated along the wall facing the bed. An audience. A dead audience.”

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

145. “A week later he was working for the Tattler.”

— Thomas Harris

146. “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?”

— Thomas Harris

147. “Ralph died,” Dolarhyde said. “I don’t think he liked it very much.”

— Thomas Harris

148. “Spoken like a Protestant.”

— Thomas Harris

149. “Do not say ‘Thanks.’” A fractional turn of his head was enough to dash his annoyance like a glass thrown into the fireplace. “I say what I mean,” Starling said. “Would you like it better if I said ‘I’m glad you find me so.’ That would be a little fancier, and equally true.” She raised her glass beneath her level prairie gaze, taking back nothing.”

— Thomas Harris

150. “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?”

— Thomas Harris