Anthony Martinez > Anthony's Quotes

“Nothing made me happen. I happened.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“The tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“I think it's easy to mistake understanding for empathy - we want empathy so badly. Maybe learning to make that distinction is part of growing up. It's hard and ugly to know somebody can understand you without even liking you.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“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, The Silence of the Lambs

“Silence can mock.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“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, Red Dragon

“We can only learn so much and live.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“In the vaults of our hearts and brains, danger waits. All the chambers are not lovely, light and high. There are holes in the floor of the mind, like those in a medieval dungeon floor - the stinking oubliettes, named for forgetting, bottle-shaped cells in solid rock with the trapdoor in the top. Nothing escapes from them quietly to ease us. A quake, some betrayal by our safeguards, and sparks of memory fire the noxious gases - things trapped for years fly free, ready to explode in pain and drive us to dangerous behavior...”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“Dr. Fell, do you believe a man could become so obsessed with a woman, from a single encounter?
Could he daily feel a stab of hunger for her and find nourishment in the very sight of her? I think so. But would she see through the bars of his plight and ache for him?”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“God's creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“You would think such a day would tremble to begin . . .”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“You know how cats do. They hide to die. Dogs come home.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“I am the dragon, and you call me insane.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“… It is not healing to see your childhood home, but it helps you measure whether you are broken, and how and why, assuming you want to know.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal Rising

“What do you look at while you’re making up your mind? Ours is not a reflective culture, we do no raise our eyes up to the hills. Most of the time we decide the critical things while looking at the linoleum floor of an institutional corridor, or whispering hurriedly in a waiting room with a television blatting nonsense.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“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, Hannibal

“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, The Silence of the Lambs

“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, The Silence of the Lambs

“How seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home.”
― Thomas Harris

“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, The Silence of the Lambs

“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, Hannibal Rising

“They waited for the elevator. " Most people love butterflies and hate moth," he said. "But moths are more interesting - more engaging."
"They're destructive."
"Some are, a lot are, but they live in all kinds of ways. Just like we do." Silence for one floor.
"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.
The old definition of moth was, 'anything that gradually, silently eats, consumes, or wages any other thing.'
It was a verb for destruction too. . . .”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“I would not have had that happen to you. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“Lecter is so lucid, so perceptive; he's trained in psychiatry... and he's a mass murderer.”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon

“In her way, she was a hard one. Faith in any sort of natural justice was nothing but a night light; she knew of that. Whatever she did, she would end the same way with everyone does: flat on her back with a tube in her nose, wondering, "Is this all?”
― Thomas Harris, Red Dragon