He had had enough of the wideeyed dead.
They had been in a row, seated along the wall facing the bed. An audience. A dead audience.
A long time ago John Brigham had asked her something and she said no. And then he asked her if they could be friends, and meant it, and she said yes, and meant it.
Primum non nocere. First do no harm.
Oh, Reba, I can’t stand to watch you burn.
He was casting a big Rapala with three treble hooks which his grandfather had given him. He was fishing too fast, casting again and again, retrieving too fast, until he was red-faced and his tee-shirt stuck to him.
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.
Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books.
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?
The world will not be this way within the reach of my arm.
Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.
He did it because he liked it. Still does. Dr. Lecter is not crazy, in any common way we think of being crazy. He did some hideous things because he enjoyed them. But he can function perfectly when he wants to.
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.
You said that I, who see more than you, am insane. I, who pushed the world so much further than you, am insane. I have dared more than you, I have pressed my unique seal so much deeper in the earth, where it will last longer than your dust... you owe me awe.
Dolarhyde bore screams as a sculptor bears dust from the beaten stone.
How do you behave when you know the conventional honors are dross? When you have come to believe with Marcus Aurelius that the opinion of future generations will be worth no more than the opinion of the current one? Is it possible to behave well then? Desirable to behave well then?
He was a person who agreed with everything his victim said before he killed him.
Hannibal had entered his heart’s long winter. He slept soundly and was not visited in dreams as humans are.
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.
Do not say ‘Thanks.’” A fractional turn of his head was enough to dash his annoyance like a glass thrown into the fireplace. “I say what I mean,” Starling said. “Would you like it better if I said ‘I’m glad you find me so.’ That would be a little fancier, and equally true.” She raised her glass beneath her level prairie gaze, taking back nothing.