Top 200 Thomas Harris Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

106. “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

107. “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

108. “Silence and no lambs screaming.”

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

111. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

116. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

118. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

126. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

129. “Who are you anyway?” Krendler said. “You’re not Starling. You’ve got the spot on your face, but you’re not Starling.”

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

136. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

138. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

140. “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

141. “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

142. “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

143. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

145. “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

146. “We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the cafe curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we’re frightened in the face of Doom.”

— Thomas Harris

147. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris