Thomas Harris Hannibal Quotes & Sayings

You know how cats do. They hide to die. Dogs come home. — Thomas Harris

When the Fox hears the Rabbit scream he comes a-runnin', but not to help. — Thomas Harris

When you show the odd flash of contextual intelligence, I forget your generation can't read, Clarice.
Hannibal Lecter — Thomas Harris

If I saw you everyday forever, I would remember this time. — Thomas Harris

I'm going to cut you loose. With all due respect, Doctor, if you fuck with me I'll shoot you dead, here and now. Do you understand that?"- Clarice

"Perfectly."- Hannibal Lecter

"Do right and you'll live through this." -Clarice — Thomas Harris

When you feel strain, keep your mouth shut if you can. — Thomas Harris

Pictures ... flashed on her in sudden color, too much color, shocking color, the color that leaps out of black when lightning strikes at night. — Thomas Harris

Hannibal at eighteen was rooting for Mephistopheles and contemptuous of Faust, but he only half-listened to the climax. He was watching and breathing Lady Murasaki ... — Thomas Harris

We live in a primitive time - don't we, Will? - neither savage nor wise. Half measures are the curse of it. Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books. — Thomas Harris

It occurred to Dr. Lecter in the moment that with all his knowledge and intrusion, he could never entirely predict her, or own her at all. He could feed the caterpillar, he could whisper through the chrysalis; what hatched out followed its own nature and was beyond him. He wondered if she had the .45 on her leg beneath the gown.
Clarice Starling smiled at him then, the cabochons caught the firelight and the monster was lost in self-congratulation at his own exquisite taste and cunning. — Thomas Harris

Orion is above the horizon now, and near it Jupiter, brighter than it will ever be ... But i expect you can see it too. Some of our stars are the same. — Thomas Harris

A census taker tried to quantify me once. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a big Amarone. Go back to school, little Starling. — Thomas Harris

I love myself that much and I will never apologize to you. — Thomas Harris

Every person is worth your time, Hannibal. If at first appearance a person seems dull, then look harder, look into him. — Thomas Harris

Can you smell his sweat? That peculiar goatish odor is trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid. Remember it, it's the smell of schizophrenia. — Thomas Harris

It's indignity you can't stand, Hannibal, you're like a cat that way. — Thomas Harris

That there had to be a place in the world for Mischa, a prime place vacated for her, and I came to think, Clarice, that the best place in the world was yours. — Thomas Harris

Lecter is so lucid, so perceptive; he's trained in psychiatry ... and he's a mass murderer. — Thomas Harris

He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart. — Thomas Harris

Starling looked at Crawford steadily, but she was too still. "Hannibal the Cannibal," she said. — Thomas Harris

Who's the subject?"
"The psychiatrist - Dr. Hannibal Lecter," Crawford said.
A brief silence follows the name, always, in any civilized gathering. — Thomas Harris

I'm giving serious thought into eating yor wife - Hannibal Lecter — Thomas Harris

Spaces devoted to Hannibal Lecter's earliest years differ from the other archives in being incomplete. Some are static scenes, fragmentary, like painted attic shards held together by blank plaster. Other rooms hold sound and motion, great snakes wrestling and heaving in the dark and lit in flashes. Pleas and screaming fill some places on the grounds where Hannibal himself cannot go. But the corridors do not echo screaming, and there is music if you like. — Thomas Harris