260 Quotes by Thomas Harris

It’s fear, Jack. The man deals with a huge amount of fear.? Because he got hurt?? No, not entirely. Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.

IT SEEMED TO SVENKA that Dortlich’s father was never going to die. The old man breathed and breathed, two years of breathing while the coffin draped with a tarpaulin waited on sawhorses in Svenka’s cramped apartment. It took up most of the parlor. This occasioned a lot of griping by the woman living with Svenka, who pointed out that the coffin’s rounded top prevented its use even as a sideboard.

A murder house is ugly to the neighbors, like the face of someone who betrayed them. Only outsiders and children stare.

Spoken like a Protestant.

The advantage of beating a mute is he can’t tell on you.

Primum non nocere. First do no harm.

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.

One quality in a person doesn’t rule out any other quality. They can exist side by side, good and terrible. Socrates said it a lot better.

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.