Hannibal Lecter Quotes

Nothing made me happen. I happened.

I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti

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

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

I’ll take him outside and beat him for making my girl cry. (Acheron) Really? (Kat) Absolutely. Forget medieval, I’ll break Atlantean on his ass, and you’ve seen what a ticked-off Atlantean god can do. Makes Hannibal Lecter look like a crybaby. (Acheron)

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

…well just call me Hannibal Lecter. With cleavage.

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.

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.

I'm giving serious thought into eating yor wife” - Hannibal Lecter

Are you looking for sympathy? You'll find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis

Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.

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

Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.

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.

Silence can mock.

We can only learn so much and live.

The worm that destroys you is the temptation to agree with your critics, to get their approval.

I'm not sure you get wiser as you get older, Starling, but you do learn to dodge a certain amount of hell.

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

God's creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again.

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.

Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can't reduce me to a set of influences.

The most stable elements, Clarice, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver. Between iron and silver. I think that is appropriate for you.

Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

Psychopaths don't act like Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates. They come off like Hugh Grant, in his most adorable role.

Problem-solving is hunting; it is savage pleasure and we are born to it.

What does he do, Clarice? What is the first and principal thing he does, what need does he serve by killing? He covets. How do we begin to covet? We begin by coveting what we see every day.

There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named—the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.

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

One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.

Hello Clarice...

You would think such a day would tremble to begin . . .

Did you ever think, Clarice, why the Philistines don't understand you? It's because you are the answer to Samson's riddle. You are the honey in the lion.

I am the dragon, and you call me insane.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

But the face on the pillow, rosy in the firelight, is certainly that of Clarice Starling, and she sleeps deeply, sweetly, in the silence of the lambs.

Shiloh isn’t haunted – men are haunted. Shiloh doesn’t care.

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

Good-bye Clarice. Will you let me know if ever the lambs stop screaming?" "Yes." Pembry was taking her arm. It was go or fight him. "Yes," she said. "I'll tell you." "Do you promise?""Yes.

The very air had screams smeared on it. He flinched from the noise in this silent room.

… 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.

It rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it is told.

What he has in addition is pure empathy and projection,” Dr. Bloom said. “He can assume your point of view, or mine – and maybe some other points of view that scare and sicken him. It’s an uncomfortable gift, Jack. Perception’s a tool that’s pointed on both ends.

I expect most psychiatrists have a patient or two they'd like to refer to me.

He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.

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

I have no plans to call on you, Clarice, the world being more interesting with you in it.

On a related subject, Signore Pazzi, I must confess to you: I'm giving serious thought to eating your wife.

I would not have had that happen to you. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.

Life's too slippery for books, Clarice; anger appears as lust, lupus presents as hives.

The first step in the development of taste is to be willing to to credit your own opinion.

Back at his chair he cannot remember what he was reading. He feels the books beside him to find the one that is warm.

Gratitude’s got a short half-life, Clarice.

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.

I'll confess it is pleasant to look at you asleep. You're quite beautiful, Clarice.

Don't think you can persuade me with appeals to my intellectual vanity.

There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us.

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.

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...

We don't begin to covet with imagined things. Coveting is a very literal sin–we begin to covet with tangibles, we begin with what we see every day.

... the washing machine's rhythm was like a giant heartbeat, and the rush of its waters was what the unborn hear- our last memory of peace.

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.

The world will not be this way within the reach of my arm.

Intense fear comes in waves; the body can’t stand it for long at a time.

We assign a moment to decision, to dignify the process as a timely result of rational and conscious thought. But decisions are made of kneaded feelings; they are more often a lump than a sum.

She wanted to go inside. She wanted to go in, wanting it as we want to jump from balconies, as the glint of the rails tempts us when we hear the approaching train.

It's hard and ugly to know someone can understand you without even liking you.

We routinely leave our small children in day care among strangers. At the same time, in our guilt we evince paranoia about strangers and foster fear in children.

Because it's his bad luck to be the best.

People don't always tell you what they are thinking. They just see to it that you don't advance in life.

He knew that a middle-aged man can be so desperate for wisdom he may try to make some up, and how deadly that can be to a youngster who believes him.

Almost every place has a moment of the day, an angle and intensity of light, in which it looks its best. When you're stuck someplace, you learn that time and you look forward to it.

She was charming way a cub is charming, a small cub that will grow up to be like one of the big cats. One you can't play with later

In making friends, she was wary of people who foster dependency and feed on it. She had been involved with a few--the blind attract them, and they are the enemy.

He could feed the caterpillar, he could whisper through the chrysalis; what hatched out followed its own nature and was beyond him.

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?

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

Occasionally, on purpose, Dr. Lecter drops a teacup to shatter on the floor. He is satisfied when it does not gather itself together. For many months now, he has not seen Mischa in his dreams. Someday perhaps a cup will come together. Or somewhere Starling may hear a crossbow string and come to some unwilled awakening, if indeed she even sleeps.

When Will Graham could open his right eye, he saw the clock and knew where he was- an intensive-care unit. He knew to watch the clock. Its movement assured him that this was passing, would pass. That's what it was there for.

In the Green Machine there is no mercy; we make mercy, manufacture it in parts that have overgrown our basic reptile brain. There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us.

He’s a monster. I think of him as one of those pitiful things that are born in hospitals from time to time. They feed it, and keep it warm, but they don’t put it on the machines and it dies. Lecter is the same way in his head, but he looks normal and nobody could tell.

And your dinner for the orchestra officials." "Haven't you ever had people coming over and no time to shop? You have to make do with what's in the fridge, Clarice. May I call you Clarice?

To write a novel, you begin with what you can see and then you add what came before and what came after. ...You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

He looked up and saw her and his breath stopped in his throat. His hands stopped too, still spread above the keyboard. Harpsichord notes do not carry, and in the sudden quiet of the drawing room they both heard him take his next breath.

Graham had a lot of trouble with taste. Often his thoughts were not tasty. There were no effective partitions in his mind. What he saw and learned touched everything else he knew. Some of the combinations were hard to live with. But he could not anticipate them, could not block and repress. His learned values of decency and propriety tagged along, shocked at his associations, appalled at his dreams; sorry that in the bone arena of his skull there were no forts for what he loved. His associations came at the speed of light. His value judgments were at the pace of a responsive reading. They could never keep up and direct his thinking. He viewed his own mentality as grotesque but useful, like a chair made of antlers. There was nothing he could do about it.

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.

Waste and stupidity get you the worst, that’s what he said. Use this time and it’ll temper you. Now’s the hardest test—not letting rage and frustration keep you from thinking. It’s the core of whether you can command or not.

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.

It was as though committing murders had purged him of lesser rudeness. Or perhaps, Starling thought, it excited him to see her marked in this particular way. She couldn't tell. The sparks in his eyes flew into his darkness like fireflies down a cave.

Before Me you are a slug in the sun. You are privy to a great Becoming and you recognize nothing. You are an ant in the after-birth. It is in your nature to do one thing correctly: before Me you rightly tremble. Fear is not what you owe Me, Lounds, you and the other pismires. You owe Me awe.

When you were so depressed after you shot Mr. Garrett Jacob Hobbs to death, it wasn’t the act that got you down, was it? Really, didn’t you feel so bad because killing him felt so good? Think about it, but don’t worry about it. Why shouldn’t it feel good? It must feel good to God—He does it all the time, and are we not made in His image?

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. . . .

Do you know how you caught me, Will?' 'Good-bye, Dr. Lecter. You can leave messages for me at the number on the file.' Graham walked away. 'Do you know how you caught me?' Graham was out of Lecter's sight now, and he walked faster toward the far steel door. 'The reason you caught me is that we're just alike' was the last thing Graham heard as the steel door closed behind him.