Status Updates From Hannibal (Hannibal Lecter #3)

"We can only learn so much and live."

"'What you need of your father is here, in your head, and subject to your judgement, not his.'"

"Behind his fevered calculations is the desperate wish to make a place for Mischa in the world, perhaps the place now occupied by Clarice Starling."

"Between ministrations to Starling, he sits in his armchair with a big pad of butcher paper doing calculations...his equations begin brilliantly and then decline, doomed by wishful thinking. Lecter wants time to reverse-no longer should increasing entropy mark the direction of time. He wants increasing order to point the way"

"No photographs of her parents survived. She had been without them for a long time and she had them only in her mind. Sometimes, in the flavors of breakfast or in a scent, a scrap of conversation, a homely expression overheard, she felt their hands on her: she felt it strongest in her sense of right and wrong. Who the hell was she? Who had ever recognized her?"

"What do you look at while you're making up your mind? Ours is not a reflective culture, we do not raise our eyes up to the hills. Most of the time we decide the critical things while looking at the linoleum floor or an institutional corridor, or whispering hurriedly in a waiting room with a television blatting nonsense."

"In the gathering gloom only his 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."

"should the universe contract, should time reverse and teacups come together, a place could be made for Mischa in the world. The worthiest place that Dr. Lecter knew: Starling's place. Mischa could have Starling's place in the world. If it came to that, if that time acme around again, Starling's demise would leave a place for Mischa as sparkling and clean as the copper bathtub in the garden."

"from the red plasma core of their fusion, the sparks flew upward, carrying their single image to the east, into the night sky to wheel with the stars above the sea."

"Dr. Lecter's maroon eyes opened wide at the sioght of her and int he depths of his pupils sparks flew around his image of her face. He held her countenance full and perfect in his mind long after she was gone from the screen."

"Krendler maintained a tame conscience with which to shrive himself. It consoled him now."

"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."

"Everyone seemed a little too chirpy. A person with Barney's hospital experience knows excessive chirpiness does not bode well for the chirpee."

"a solid 'thock,' a crossbow bolt driving through the skull-and we have the pleasant woods again, and flowing music and Starling, limned in polleny light runs out of sight...Dr. Lecter held his glass up to the candle. The candle flared behind it as the sun flared on water, and the wine itself was the color of the winter sun on Clarice Starling's skin."

"The personnel were younger than Starling. It was something she'd have to get used to, she thought with a twinge-she'd be a year older very soon."

"'It's whimsy,' she said, looking to see if she put them off with the exact word. 'It's "whimsy," and it's what got him caught last time.'"

This entire section has made me hungry for olive garden. How I felt spotting a rhetorical device: 😎. I knew he was going to die because he peeled an orange with a knife.