Thomas Harris Quotes

Growing up, I was afraid of the dark.

...Things happened when you were little. Things you don't remember now, and don't want to. But they need to escape, need to worm their way out of that dark place in your brain where you keep them stashed.

My head was spinning, I had never seen blood. Four years old, this don't feel like love.

Man torturing man is a fiend beyond description. You turn a corner in the dark and there he is. You congeal into a bundle of inanimate fear. You become the very soul of anesthesia. But there is no escaping him. It is your turn now.

The Undertaker's beaten me down pretty bad quite a few times.

Can you imagine, I lost my mother at age six? My childhood ended then.

My mom died when I was 11 years old.

If you only knew what it did to me to have lived in that house where the police were bursting in to take everyone away! I certainly didn't have a happy and serene childhood.

Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go. Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness.

And then the screaming begins.

Childhood should be carefree, playing in the sun; not living a nightmare in the darkness of the soul.

I saw a young boy eating an ice cream cone, ... I smashed it in his face. You know that kid is going to remember me when he's 50.

The dark Gods of pain are surfacing from the immemorial filth of time.

The best time to cry is at night, when the lights are out and someone is being beaten up and screaming for help.

I think there are so many children being brought up in some form of violence, be it violence of poverty or sexism or racism or homophobia or transphobia. That violence takes a life to transform or overcome. I don't think people should be spending their lives dealing with that. I think people should be thriving, playing, creating, evolving.

And this is what we called our childhoods. Little more than a dress rehearsal for adding our digits to the butcher's bill of war.

Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self, the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood.

And I hope she does not live in a dark world. Because even the most terrible loss doesn't have to make you darker; it can make you deeper.

I slammed the door in the child's face, a horrific scream trapped in my throat.

Gripping my arm, Mother held it in the orange-blue flame. My skin seemed to explode from the heat.

I thought I could capture the stories of the city on paper. I thought I could write about the horrors of the city. Horror stories you see. I tell you I didn't have to look far for material. Everywhere I looked, there were stories hidden there in the dark corners. . . . I wrote and still there were more. . . . No one would publish them. 'Too horrible,' they said. 'Sick mind,' they said. I thought I could write about the horrors of the city but the horror is too big and it goes on forever.

Almost the whole of history is but a sequence of horrors.

My mom beat me up," I informed my reflection. It looked back sympathetically.

She had opened a door... and now she was walking with demons. And at the end of her travels, she would have her revenge... Pain had made a sadist of her.