Silence Of The Lambs Quotes

When the Fox hears the Rabbit scream he comes a-runnin', but not to help.

Nothing made me happen. I happened.

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

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

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.

Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.

Silence can mock.

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.

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.

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

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.

Hello Clarice...

Oh God, is this like Silence of the Lambs?" Tears flowed down her face. "I don't want to go down the hole! I won't put lotion on the skin! Look at me, you won't be able to wear my skin, I won't cover your huge ass!" She wailed.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

And when the Lamb opened the seventh seal, silence coverd the sky

The intimacy of the detail - why The Silence of the Lambs is quite possibly the Thriller Writer's bible.

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?

It occured to Starling how much Roden would benefit from an elbow smash in the hinge of his jaw.

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.

I know what you're afraid of. It's not pain, or solitude. It's indignity you can't stand, Hannibal, you're like a cat that way.

Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.

Silence of the Lambs screenwriter Ted Tally put the art of writing dialogue succinctly: ‘What’s important is not the emotion they’re playing but the emotion they’re trying to conceal.

Ready when you are Sergeant Pempbry.

Baby needs a new pair of shoes,' he said. 'My baby doesn't need any shoes.

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. . . .

The sun's a mattress fire her God died in.

Problem solving is hunting. It's a savage pleasure and we're born to it.

Curious how things can work on you even when you recognize them.

The emperor counsels simplicity. First principles. Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its causal nature?

The lambs will stop for now. But, Clarice, you judge yourself with all the mercy of the dungeon scales at Threave; you'll have to earn it again and again, the blessed silence. Because it's the plight that drives you, seeing the plight, and the plight will not end, ever.

You'd better go now; I don't think Miggs could manage again so soon, even if he is crazy, do you?

You still wake up sometimes, don’t you? Wake up in the iron dark with the lambs screaming?” “Sometimes.” “Do you think if you caught Buffalo Bill yourself and if you made Catherine all right, you could make the lambs stop screaming, do you think they’d be all right too and you wouldn’t wake up again in the dark and hear the lambs screaming? Clarice?” “Yes. I don’t know. Maybe.” “Thank you, Clarice.” Dr. Lecter seemed oddly at peace.

En este extraño mundo, esta mitad del mundo que ahora está a oscuras, tengo que perseguir a un ser que se alimenta de lágrimas

It’s indignity you can’t stand, Hannibal, you’re like a cat that way.

His empty hands hanging palms forward at his sides, he stood at the window looking to the empty east. He did not look for dawn; east was only the way the window faced.

And the study?” “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.

Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?

Oh wrangling schools, that search what fire Shall burn this world had none the wit Unto this knowledge to aspire That this her fever might be it? I'm so sorry about Bella, Jack.

He held it at arm's length, through the bars, his forefinger along the spine. She reached across the barrier and took it. For an instant the tip of her forefinger touched Dr. Lecter's. The touch crackled in his eyes. "Thank you, Clarice." "Thank you, Dr. Lecter." And that is how he remained in Starling's mind. Caught in the instant when he did not mock. Standing in his white cell, arched like a dancer, his hands clasped in front of him and his head slightly to the side.

It was as though committing murders had purged him of lesser rudeness.

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?

Who's the subject?" "The psychiatrist - Dr. Hannibal Lecter," Crawford said. A brief silence follows the name, always, in any civilized gathering.

Pictures ... flashed on her in sudden color, too much color, shocking color, the color that leaps out of black when lightning strikes at night.

They drew the line on dogs at the hospital and wouldn’t let the dog in. A fireman, instructed to drop it off at the animal shelter, took it home with him instead.

Will Graham, the keenest hound ever to run in Crawford’s pack, was a legend at the Academy; he was also a drunk in Florida now with a face that was hard to look at, they said.

Crawford saw that in this place Starling was heir to the granny women, to the wise women, the herb healers, the stalwart country women who have always done the needful, who keep the watch and when the watch is over, wash and dress the country dead.

He cleared his throat. “One good thing about the range, Starling, is there’s no politics out there.” “No?” “You were right to secure that garage up at Baltimore there. You worried about the TV?

Зло порождается страстью.Hannibal Lecter

Starling looked at Crawford steadily, but she was too still. “Hannibal the Cannibal,” she said.

Two things to begin with. First, we go on the premise that Dr. Lecter really knows something concrete. second, we remember that Lecter looks only for the fun. Never forget fun.

And then, the last words Raspail ever said: 'I wonder why my parents didn't kill me before I was old enough to fool them.' The slender handle of the stiletto wiggled as Raspail's spiked heart tried to keep beating, and Dr Lecter said, 'Looks like a straw down a doodlebug hole, doesn't it?' but it was too late for Raspail to answer.

After a horribly long day, I needed a mental break. I threw on my parka, with the raccoon fur around the hood, and I went to see a movie. But what to see? Something sweet and stupid and harmless. At the movie theater on Second Avenue and Twelfth, a title caught my eye. I thought, 'That seems good. Jodie Foster and a puffy, friendly farm animal, a butterfly.' I unzipped my jacket and headed inside to see a movie I'd heard the name of but knew nothing about. It was called Silence Of The Lambs.

This is the hardest time, Starling. Use this time and it will 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. Waste and stupidity will get you the worst.

She thought for an instant of her late parents. She wondered if they would be ashamed of her now—just that question, not its pertinence, no qualifications—the way we always ask it.

Sometimes Crawford's tone reminded Starling of the know-it-all caterpillar in Lewis Caroll.

Good,” Mapp said. “That’s very good. Eat some crabs. Grab Pilcher and smooch him on his face, go wild.

Pity Catherine Martin won't ever see the sun again. The sun's a mattress fire her God died in, Clarice.

Far beneath the rusty Baltimore dawn, stirrings in the maximum security ward. Down where it is never dark the tormented sense beginning day as oysters in a barrel open to their lost tide. God’s creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again and the ravers cleared their throats.

You lean back against the door with bowed head making ready to set out. By the time you open your eyes your feet have disappeared and the skirt of your great coat come to rest on the surface of the snow. The dark scene seems lit from below. You see yourself at the last outset leaning against the door with closed eyes waiting for the word from you to go. To be gone.Then the snowlit scene. You lie in the dark with closed eyes and see yourself there as described making ready to strike out and away across the expanse of light. You hear again the click of the door pulled gently to and the silence before the steps can start. Next thing you are on your way across the white pasture afrolic with lambs in spring and strewn with red placantae.

Crawford, ever wary of desire, knew how badly he wanted to be wise. 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. So he spoke carefully, and only of things he knew.

Oh God, is this like Silence of the Lambs?" Tears flowed down her face. "I don't want to go down the hole! I won't put lotion on the skin! Look at me, you won't be able to wear my skin, I won't cover your huge ass!" she wailed. He

Bella, I love you, kid,” he said in case she could hear. Fear brushed the walls of his chest, circling inside him like a bat in a house. Then he got hold of it. He wanted to get something for her, anything, but he did not want her to feel him let go of her hand.

Starling discovered that she had traded feeling frightened for feeling cheap. Of the two, she preferred feeling frightened.

Dark swarmed behind her eyelids and, in jerky seconds of sleep, she dreamed the dark came into her. Dark came insidious, up her nose and into her ears, damp fingers of dark proposed themselves to each of her body openings. She put her hand over her mouth and nose, put her other hand over her vagina, clenched her buttocks, turned one ear to the mattress and sacrificed the other ear to the intrusion of the dark.

She found Starling in the warm laundry room, dozing against the slow rump-rump of a washing machine in the smell of bleach and soap and fabric softener. Starling had the psychology background--Mapp's was law--yet it was Mapp who knew that the washing machine's rhythm was like a great heartbeat and the rush of its waters was what the unborn hear--our last memory of peace.

The sweet-smelling aroma of the island spices still hung in the air. It filled his nostrils and titillated his appetite all over again. His appetite drove him mad for something much more than food.

Chilton went behind Dr. Lecter and, with a glance at the camera, undid the straps and removed the mask with a flourish. “Senator Martin, meet Dr. Hannibal Lecter.” Seeing what Dr. Chilton had done for showmanship frightened Senator Martin as much as anything that had happened since her daughter disappeared. Any confidence she might have had in Chilton’s judgment was replaced with the cold fear that he was a fool. She’d have to wing it.

The pudgy one moved his bishop and immediately turned the beetle around and started it trudging back the other way. “If the beetle just cuts across the corner, is time up then?” Starling asked. “Of course time’s up then,” the pudgy one said loudly, without looking up. “Of course it’s up then. How do you play? Do you make him cross the whole board? Who do you play against, a sloth?

Starling knew what the malicious Dr. Lecter would say, and it was true: she was afraid there was something tacky that Senator Martin saw in her, something cheap, something thief-like that Senator Martin reacted to. That Vanderbilt bitch. Dr. Lecter would relish pointing out that class resentment, the buried anger that comes with mother's milk, was a factor too. Starling gave away nothing to any Martin in education, intelligence, drive, and certainly physical appearance, but still it was there and she knew it.

You think nuts don’t apply to the FBI? We get ’em all the time. A man in a Moe hairpiece applied in St. Louis last week. He had a bazooka, two rockets, and a bearskin shako in his golf bag.” “Did you hire him?

Starling walked up and down the linoleum of the shabby lounge far underground. She was the only brightness in the room. 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 café 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.

Some days you wake up changed. This was one for Starling, she could tell. What she had seen yesterday at the Potter Funeral Home had caused in her a small tectonic shift. Starling had studied psychology and criminology in a good school. In her life she had seen some of the hideously offhand ways in which the world breaks things. But she hadn’t really known, and now she knew: sometimes the family of man produces, behind a human face, a mind whose pleasure is what lay on the porcelain table at Potter, West Virginia, in the room with the cabbage roses. Starling’s first apprehension of that mind was worse than anything she could see on the autopsy scales. The knowledge would lie against her skin forever,

This is the Death’s-head Moth,” he said. “That’s nightshade she’s sitting on—we’re hoping she’ll lay.” The moth was wonderful and terrible to see, its large brown-black wings tented like a cloak, and on its wide furry back, the signature device that has struck fear in men for as long as men have come upon it suddenly in their happy gardens. The domed skull, a skull that is both skull and face, watching from its dark eyes, the cheekbones, the zygomatic arch traced exquisitely beside the eyes. “Acherontia styx,” Pilcher said. “It’s named for two rivers in Hell. Your man, he drops the bodies in a river every time—did I read that?” “Yes,” Starling said. “Is it rare?” “In this part of the world it is. There aren’t any at all in nature.

What, the Star Wars?” Mapp said. “If the aliens are trying to control Buffalo Bill’s thoughts from another planet, Senator Martin can protect him—is that the pitch?” Starling nodded. “A lot of paranoid schizophrenics have that specific hallucination—alien control. If that’s the way Bill’s wired, maybe this approach could bring him out. It’s a damn good shot, though, and she stood up there and fired it, didn’t she?

I can tell him what you’ve said.” “He’ll ignore it. And Buffalo Bill will go on and on. Wait until he scalps one and see how you like it. Ummmm … I’ll tell you one thing about Buffalo Bill without ever seeing the case, and years from now when they catch him, if they ever do, you’ll see that I was right and I could have helped. I could have saved lives. Clarice?

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 café 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.

Between the onion and the parsley, therefore, I shall give the summation of my case for paying attention. Man's real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are. That is, after all, what God does, and man was not made in God's image for nothing. The fruits of his attention can be seen in all the arts, crafts, and sciences. It can cost him time and effort, but it pays handsomely. If an hour can be spent on one onion, think how much regarding it took on the part of that old Russian who looked at onions and church spires long enough to come up with St. Basil's Cathedral. Or how much curious and loving attention was expended by the first man who looked hard enough at the inside of trees, the entrails of cats, the hind ends of horses and the juice of pine trees to realize he could turn them all into the first fiddle. No doubt his wife urged him to get up and do something useful. I am sure that he was a stalwart enough lover of things to pay no attention at all to her nagging; but how wonderful it would have been if he had known what we know now about his dawdling. He could have silenced her with the greatest riposte of all time: Don't bother me; I am creating the possibility of the Bach unaccompanied sonatas. But if man's attention is repaid so handsomely, his inattention costs him dearly. Every time he diagrams something instead of looking at it, every time he regards not what a thing is but what it can be made to mean to him - every time he substitutes a conceit for a fact - he gets grease all over the kitchen of the world. Reality slips away from him; and he is left with nothing but the oldest monstrosity in the world: an idol. Things must be met for themselves. To take them only for their meaning is to convert them into gods - to make them too important, and therefore to make them unimportant altogether. Idolatry has two faults. It is not only a slur on the true God; it is also an insult to true things. They made a calf in Horeb; thus they turned their Glory into the similitude of a calf that eateth hay. Bad enough, you say. Ah, but it was worse than that. Whatever good may have resided in the Golden Calf - whatever loveliness of gold or beauty of line - went begging the minute the Israelites got the idea that it was their savior out of the bondage of Egypt. In making the statue a matter of the greatest point, they missed the point of its matter altogether.

THE MEETING" "Scant rain had fallen and the summer sun Had scorched with waves of heat the ripening corn, That August nightfall, as I crossed the down Work-weary, half in dream. Beside a fence Skirting a penning’s edge, an old man waited Motionless in the mist, with downcast head And clothing weather-worn. I asked his name And why he lingered at so lonely a place. “I was a shepherd here. Two hundred seasons I roamed these windswept downlands with my flock. No fences barred our progress and we’d travel Wherever the bite grew deep. In summer drought I’d climb from flower-banked combe to barrow’d hill-top To find a missing straggler or set snares By wood or turmon-patch. In gales of March I’d crouch nightlong tending my suckling lambs. “I was a ploughman, too. Year upon year I trudged half-doubled, hands clenched to my shafts, Guiding my turning furrow. Overhead, Cloud-patterns built and faded, many a song Of lark and pewit melodied my toil. I durst not pause to heed them, rising at dawn To groom and dress my team: by daylight’s end My boots hung heavy, clodded with chalk and flint. “And then I was a carter. With my skill I built the reeded dew-pond, sliced out hay From the dense-matted rick. At harvest time, My wain piled high with sheaves, I urged the horses Back to the master’s barn with shouts and curses Before the scurrying storm. Through sunlit days On this same slope where you now stand, my friend, I stood till dusk scything the poppied fields. “My cob-built home has crumbled. Hereabouts Few folk remember me: and though you stare Till time’s conclusion you’ll not glimpse me striding The broad, bare down with flock or toiling team. Yet in this landscape still my spirit lingers: Down the long bottom where the tractors rumble, On the steep hanging where wild grasses murmur, In the sparse covert where the dog-fox patters.” My comrade turned aside. From the damp sward Drifted a scent of melilot and thyme; From far across the down a barn owl shouted, Circling the silence of that summer evening: But in an instant, as I stepped towards him Striving to view his face, his contour altered. Before me, in the vaporous gloaming, stood Nothing of flesh, only a post of wood.

I BELIEVE THAT we know much more about God than we admit that we know, than perhaps we altogether know that we know. God speaks to us, I would say, much more often than we realize or than we choose to realize. Before the sun sets every evening, he speaks to each of us in an intensely personal and unmistakable way. His message is not written out in starlight, which in the long run would make no difference; rather it is written out for each of us in the humdrum, helter-skelter events of each day; it is a message that in the long run might just make all the difference. Who knows what he will say to me today or to you today or into the midst of what kind of unlikely moment he will choose to say it. Not knowing is what makes today a holy mystery as every day is a holy mystery. But I believe that there are some things that by and large God is always saying to each of us. Each of us, for instance, carries around inside himself, I believe, a certain emptiness—a sense that something is missing, a restlessness, the deep feeling that somehow all is not right inside his skin. Psychologists sometimes call it anxiety, theologians sometimes call it estrangement, but whatever you call it, I doubt that there are many who do not recognize the experience itself, especially no one of our age, which has been variously termed the age of anxiety, the lost generation, the beat generation, the lonely crowd. Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God’s voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him. But he also speaks to us about ourselves, about what he wants us to do and what he wants us to become; and this is the area where I believe that we know so much more about him than we admit even to ourselves, where people hear God speak even if they do not believe in him. A face comes toward us down the street. Do we raise our eyes or do we keep them lowered, passing by in silence? Somebody says something about somebody else, and what he says happens to be not only cruel but also funny, and everybody laughs. Do we laugh too, or do we speak the truth? When a friend has hurt us, do we take pleasure in hating him, because hate has its pleasures as well as love, or do we try to build back some flimsy little bridge? Sometimes when we are alone, thoughts come swarming into our heads like bees—some of them destructive, ugly, self-defeating thoughts, some of them creative and glad. Which thoughts do we choose to think then, as much as we have the choice? Will we be brave today or a coward today? Not in some big way probably but in some little foolish way, yet brave still. Will we be honest today or a liar? Just some little pint-sized honesty, but honest still. Will we be a friend or cold as ice today? All the absurd little meetings, decisions, inner skirmishes that go to make up our days. It all adds up to very little, and yet it all adds up to very much. Our days are full of nonsense, and yet not, because it is precisely into the nonsense of our days that God speaks to us words of great significance—not words that are written in the stars but words that are written into the raw stuff and nonsense of our days, which are not nonsense just because God speaks into the midst of them. And the words that he says, to each of us differently, are be brave…be merciful…feed my lambs…press on toward the goal.