The Silence of the Lambs

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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. . . .

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

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

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

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.