God's creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again.
He lives down in a ribcage in the dry leaves of a heart.
Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.
When I couldn't speak I was not drawn into silence, silence captured me.
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 made me happen. I happened.
When the Fox hears the Rabbit scream he comes a-runnin', but not to help.
Silence can mock.
I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti
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.
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.
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.
We can only learn so much and live.
It's hard to have anything isn't it? Rare to get it, hard to keep it. This is a damn slippery planet.
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.
Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.
Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn't it?
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.
Writing novels is the hardest thing I've ever done, including digging irrigation ditches.