260 Quotes by Thomas Harris

We can only learn so much and live.

Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn't it?

Nothing made me happen. I happened.

It's hard to have anything isn't it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it. This is a damn slippery planet.

I collect church collapses, recreationally. Did you see the recent one in Sicily? Marvelous! The facade fell on sixty-five grandmothers at a special mass. Was that evil? If so, who did it? If he's up there, he just loves it, Officer Starling. Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place.

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.

The tragedy is not to die, but to be wasted.

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.

Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.