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Human emotions are a gift from our animal ancestors. Cruelty is a gift humanity has given itself.

Thomas Harris

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Thomas Harris
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: April 11
Author
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Jackson
Tennessee
William Thomas Harris III
Gift
Emotion
Humanity
Animal
Given
Ancestors
Human
Ancestor
Humans
Cruelty
Emotions

More quotes by Thomas Harris

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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.
Thomas Harris
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He was numb except for dreading the loss of numbness.
Thomas Harris
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You will not persuade me with appeals to my intellectual vanity.
Thomas Harris
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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?
Thomas Harris
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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.
Thomas Harris
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Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness except greed.
Thomas Harris
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He sees very clearly - he damn sure sees through me. It's hard to accept that someone can understand you without wishing you well. At Starling's age it hadn't happened to her much.
Thomas Harris
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It occured to Starling how much Roden would benefit from an elbow smash in the hinge of his jaw.
Thomas Harris
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I would not have had that happen to you. Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.
Thomas Harris
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Life's too slippery for books, Clarice anger appears as lust, lupus presents as hives.
Thomas Harris
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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.
Thomas Harris
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I found, and find, the scrutiny of Dr. Lecter uncomfortable, intrusive, like the humming of your thoughts when they x-ray your head.
Thomas Harris
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We can only learn so much and live.
Thomas Harris
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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.
Thomas Harris
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Shiloh isn’t haunted – men are haunted. Shiloh doesn’t care.
Thomas Harris
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Fear comes with imagination, it’s a penalty, it’s the price of imagination.
Thomas Harris
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… 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.
Thomas Harris
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Nothing made me happen. I happened.
Thomas Harris
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And be grateful. Our scars have the power to remind us that the past was real.
Thomas Harris
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Funerals often make us want sex-it's one in the eye for death.
Thomas Harris