“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“It was as though committing murders had purged him of lesser rudeness. Or perhaps, Starling thought, it excited him to see her marked in this particular way. She couldn't tell. The sparks in his ey...”

“Pictures ... flashed on her in sudden color, too much color, shocking color, the color that leaps out of black when lightning strikes at night.”

“I was smiling yesterday,I am smiling today and I will smile tomorrow.Simply because life is too short to cry for anything.”

“You stay safe, You love. You survive. You laugh and cry and struggle and sometimes you fail and sometimes you succeed. You Push.”

“I cut myself because you wouldn't let me cry.I cried because you wouldn't let me speak.I spoke because you wouldn't let me shine.I shone because I thought you loved me...”

“Don't cry over someone who wouldn't cry over you.”

“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: youre falling to the floor crying ...”

“Weeping is not the same thing as crying. It takes your whole body to weep, and when it's over, you feel like you don't have any bones left to hold you up.”

“Look at all the life in this," she said. "Every pip could become a tree, and every tree could bear another hundred fruits and every fruit could bear another hundred trees. And so on to infinity."I ...”

“Life is a repeated cycle of getting lost and then finding yourself again. There are many smaller cycles within that cycle where you get lost to a smaller degree and then remember yourself again. So...”

“Then we got into a labyrinth, and, when we thought we were at the end,came out again at the beginning, having still to see as much as ever.”