Top 200 Thomas Harris Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

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

— Thomas Harris

156. “Spoken like a Protestant.”

— Thomas Harris

157. “He was a person who agreed with everything his victim said before he killed him.”

— Thomas Harris

158. “Starling, I have to retire in two years. If I find Jimmy Hoffa and the Tylenol killer I still have to hang it up. It’s not a consideration.”

— Thomas Harris

159. “She delivered the paper to the night duty officer and fell into her grateful bed, the voices of the day still whispering, softer than Mapp’s breathing across the room. On the swarming dark she saw the moth’s wise little face. Those glowing eyes had looked at Buffalo Bill. Out of the cosmic hangover the Smithsonian leaves came her last thought and a coda for her day: Over this odd world, this half of the world that’s dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.”

— Thomas Harris

160. “It sped her toward the idea that Dr. Lecter’s taste for rarefied things, things in a small market, might be the monster’s dorsal fin, cutting the surface and making him visible.”

— Thomas Harris

161. “It seemed a very short distance to the outside. This was only a building, there were only five doors between Lecter and the outside. He had the absurd feeling that Lecter had walked out with him. He stopped outside the entrance and looked around him, assuring himself that he was alone.”

— Thomas Harris

162. “In the gathering gloom only his white Nike headband and his white Nike shoes and the white stripe down the side of his dark Nike running suit were visible, as though there were no man at all among the trademarks.”

— Thomas Harris

163. “Pazzi and his appendage swinging and spinning before the rough wall of the floodlit palace, jerking in posthumous spasms but not choking, dead, his shadow thrown huge on the wall by the floodlights, swinging with his bowels swinging below him in a shorter, quicker arc, his manhood pointing out of his rent trousers in a death erection.”

— Thomas Harris

164. “Barney was nearly through with his workout, cooling down on a bike, when he realized he was not alone in the room.”

— Thomas Harris

165. “There’s a moth, more than one in fact, that lives only on tears,” he offered. “That’s all they eat or drink.” “What kind of tears? Whose tears?” “The tears of large land mammals, about our size.”

— Thomas Harris

166. “Mischa, we take comfort in knowing there is no God. That you are not enslaved in Heaven, made to kiss God’s ass forever. What you have is better than Paradise. You have blessed oblivion. I miss you every day.”

— Thomas Harris

167. “She thought for an instant of her late parents. She wondered if they would be ashamed of her now – just that question, not its pertinence, no qualifications – the way we always ask it.”

— Thomas Harris

168. “I woke up and heard the lambs screaming. I woke up in the dark and the lambs were screaming.”

— Thomas Harris

169. “Starling stood in the doorway. It was here she came on her first FBI assignment, when she was still a trainee, still believed everything, still thought that if you could do the job, if you could cut it, you would be accepted, regardless of race, creed, color, national origin or whether or not you were a good old boy Of all this, there remained to her one article of faith. She believed that she could cut it. Here.”

— Thomas Harris

170. “Graham climbed out a window onto the porch roof and sat on the gritty shingles. He hugged his knees, his damp shirt pressed cold across his back, and snorted the smell of slaughter out of his nose.”

— Thomas Harris

171. “You may have noticed in the paper yesterday, God dropped a church roof on thirty-four of His worshipers in Texas Wednesday night – just as they were groveling through a hymn. Don’t you think that felt good?”

— Thomas Harris

172. “I wonder why my parents didn’t kill me before I was old enough to fool them.”

— Thomas Harris

173. “He’s all right. Just don’t mention proton decay.” “I’ll try to talk around it.”

— Thomas Harris

174. “What, the Star Wars?” Mapp said. “If the aliens are trying to control Buffalo Bill’s thoughts from another planet, Senator Martin can protect him – is that the pitch?” Starling nodded. “A lot of paranoid schizophrenics have that specific hallucination – alien control. If that’s the way Bill’s wired, maybe this approach could bring him out. It’s a damn good shot, though, and she stood up there and fired it, didn’t she?”

— Thomas Harris

175. “Often in intense conversation Graham took on the other person’s speech patterns.”

— Thomas Harris

176. “You don’t even dislike him all the time, hard as that is to believe. Then, if you’re lucky, out of the stuff you know, part of it plucks at you, tries to get your attention. Always tell me when something plucks, Starling.”

— Thomas Harris

177. “One Washington axiom, proved more times than the Pythagorean theorem, states that in the presence of oxygen, one loud fart with an obvious culprit will cover many small emissions in the same room, provided they are nearly simultaneous.”

— Thomas Harris

178. “A police station is a damn poor place to question anybody that you don’t need to scare.”

— Thomas Harris

179. “Don’t try to impose any pattern or symmetry on this guy. Stay open and let him show you.”

— Thomas Harris

180. “She wondered if men actually regard that kind of manipulation as subtle.”

— Thomas Harris

181. “One other thing,” Commissioner Lewis said. The detectives sank back in their seats. “I have heard officers in this command referring to the killer as the ‘Tooth Fairy.’ I don’t care what you call him among yourselves, I realize you have to call him something. But I had better not hear any police officer refer to him as the Tooth Fairy in public. It sounds flippant. Neither will you use that name on any internal memoranda.”

— Thomas Harris

182. “He watched her in the aisles: Molly, his pretty baseball wife, with her ceaseless vigilance for lumps, her insistence on quarterly medical check-ups for him and Willy, her controlled fear of the dark; her hard-bought knowledge that time is luck. She knew the value of their days. She could hold a moment by its stem. She had taught him to relish.”

— Thomas Harris

183. “Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn’t it? And taste isn’t kind.”

— Thomas Harris

184. “Their idle glances walked on him with many tiny feet.”

— Thomas Harris

185. “There is much honor and more sense in having succeeded with what was left, making something with the damned forty acres and a muddy mule, but you have to be able to see that. No one will tell you.”

— Thomas Harris

186. “Good-bye, Clarice. Will you let me know if ever the lambs stop screaming?”

— Thomas Harris

187. “Hevige angst komt in golven opzetten; lang achtereen kan het lichaam dat niet verduren. In de zware kalmte tussen de golven kon Dolarhyde nadenken.”

— Thomas Harris

188. “NOW THAT ceaseless exposure has calloused us to the lewd and the vulgar, it is instructive to see what still seems wicked to us.”

— Thomas Harris

189. “Crawford saw that in this place Starling was heir to the granny women, to the wise women, the herb healers, the stalwart country women who have always done the needful, who keep the watch and when the watch is over, wash and dress the country dead.”

— Thomas Harris

190. “Oh, Reba, I can’t stand to watch you burn.”

— Thomas Harris

191. “It’s hard to accept that someone can understand you without wishing you well.”

— Thomas Harris

192. “Shiloh isn’t haunted – men are haunted.”

— Thomas Harris

193. “He was casting a big Rapala with three treble hooks which his grandfather had given him. He was fishing too fast, casting again and again, retrieving too fast, until he was red-faced and his tee-shirt stuck to him.”

— Thomas Harris

194. “For years Lecter had teased the problem, wanting very much for Hawking to be right the first time, for the expanding universe to stop, for entropy to mend itself, for Mischa, eaten, to be whole again.”

— Thomas Harris

195. “I didn’t think anything would come of this canvas,’ Crawford said. ‘Well, what the hell did you expect me to do?’ ‘The best you can, that’s all.’ Crawford rose to leave. ‘Busy work’s been a narcotic for me sometimes, especially after I quit the booze. For you too, I think.’ Graham was angry. Crawford was right, of course.”

— Thomas Harris

196. “You’re his friend, Jack. Why can’t you leave him alone? ‘Because it’s his bad luck to be the best. Because he doesn’t think like other people. Somehow he never got in a rut.”

— Thomas Harris

197. “Crawford was home for a month from the hospital, the chest pains came again in the night. Instead of calling an ambulance and going through it all again, he chose simply to roll over to the solace of his late wife’s side of the bed.”

— Thomas Harris

198. “A long time ago John Brigham had asked her something and she said no. And then he asked her if they could be friends, and meant it, and she said yes, and meant it.”

— Thomas Harris

199. “He was numb and empty and he drank two fingers of whiskey from his bathroom glass before he lay down. The darkness pressed too closely on him. He turned on the bathroom light and went back to bed. He pretended Molly was in the bathroom brushing her hair.”

— Thomas Harris

200. “Hannibal stared steadily by candlelight at the faces sketched from his dreams and tried to make their mouths move. Perhaps they would sing at first, and then say their names. Hannibal sang himself, to start them singing.”

— Thomas Harris