100 Best Quotes from “Silence of the Lambs”

This terrifying psychological thriller haunts our nightmares even decades after its release. Silence of the Lambs is a spine-chilling 1991 film that defies the boundaries of conventional horror.

This gripping thriller takes the audience on a harrowing journey alongside FBI trainee Clarice Starling, as she delves into the twisted minds of serial killers in pursuit of a sadistic predator.

Silence of the Lambs stands tall as a timeless and haunting cinematic masterpiece. 

Here’s the scoop on the best quotes from Silence of the Lambs!

1. “A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.”

2. “Good evening, Clarice.” – Hannibal Lecter

3. “I do wish we could chat longer, but I’m having an old friend for dinner.” – Hannibal Lecter

4. “People will say we’re in love.” – Hannibal Lecter

5. “The world’s more interesting with you in it.” – Hannibal Lecter

6. “Quid pro quo, Clarice. Quid pro quo.” – Hannibal Lecter

7. “Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?” – Hannibal Lecter

8. “He’s a monster. Pure psychopath.” – Frederick Chilton

9. “Love your suit.” – Clarice Starling

10. “We begin by coveting what we see every day.” – Hannibal Lecter

11. “Billy is not a real transsexual, but he thinks he is. He tries to be.” – Hannibal Lecter

12. “You know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube.” – Hannibal Lecter

13. “All good things to those who wait.” – Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill

14. “Was she a great big fat person?” – Clarice Starling

15. “Look for severe childhood disturbances associated with violence.” – Clarice Starling

16. “You still wake up sometimes, don’t you?” – Hannibal Lecter

17. “You know, we get a lot of detectives here, but I must say I can’t ever remember one as attractive.” – Hannibal Lecter

18. “Most serial killers keep some sort of trophies from their victims.” – Clarice Starling

19. “I’ll help you catch him, Clarice.” – Hannibal Lecter

20. “We’ve tried to study him, of course, but he’s much too sophisticated for the standard tests.” – Hannibal Lecter

21. “What does he do, this man you seek?” – Hannibal Lecter

22. “You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs. – Hannibal Lecter

23. “No, you won’t. But you’ll be able to say, ‘I was there. I was awake and I saw.'” – Hannibal Lecter

24. “Do you know why he’s called ‘Buffalo Bill’? Please tell me, Senator.” – Hannibal Lecter

25. “I’m having an old friend for dinner.” – Hannibal Lecter

26. “What a naughty boy he is.” – Hannibal Lecter

27. “You don’t know what pain is!” – Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill

28. “We covet what we see every day.” – Hannibal Lecter

29. “I didn’t kill him, Clarice. But I’m not sure that I could have.” – Hannibal Lecter

30. “Tell me, Clarice, would you ever say to me, ‘Stop. If you loved me, you’d stop’?” – Hannibal Lecter

31. “Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek? – Hannibal Lecter

32. “You started at what time?” – Hannibal Lecter

33. “Well, Clarice, have the lambs been calling?”- Hannibal Lecter

34. “Dr. Lecter?… Dr. Lecter?…”-  Clarice Starling

35. “First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius.”- Hannibal Lecter 

36. “That is incidental. What is the first and principal thing he does? What needs does he serve by killing?”- Hannibal Lecter

37. “He covets. That is his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort to answer now.”- Hannibal Lecter

38. “We begin by coveting what we see every day. Don’t you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice? And don’t your eyes seek out the things you want?”- Hannibal Lecter

39. “No “just”, Clarice. What set you off?”- Hannibal Lecter

40. “Then something woke you, didn’t it? Was it a dream? What was it?”- Hannibal Lecter

41. “And what did you see, Clarice? What did you see?”- Hannibal Lecter

42. “What became of your lamb, Clarice?”- Hannibal Lecter

43. “Good nutrition’s given you some length of bone, but you’re not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling?”- Hannibal Lecter

44. “I’ve no plans to call on you, Clarice. The world is more interesting with you in it.”- Hannibal Lecter

45. “Jack Crawford is helping your career isn’t he? Apparently, he likes you and you like him too.”- Hannibal Lecter

46. “That is the Duomo seen from the Belvedere. Do you know Florence?”- Hannibal Lecter

47. “You still wake up sometimes, don’t you? You wake up in the dark and hear the screaming of the lambs.”- Hannibal Lecter

48. “And you think if you save poor Catherine, you could make them stop, don’t you? You think if Catherine lives, you won’t wake up in the dark ever again to that awful screaming of the lambs.”- Hannibal Lecter

49. “Brave Clarice. You will let me know when those lambs stop screaming, won’t you?”- Hannibal Lecter

50. “Clarice, your case file. Goodbye, Clarice.”- Hannibal Lecter

51. “Now then, tell me. What did Miggs say to you? Multiple Miggs in the next cell. He hissed at you. What did he say?”- Hannibal Lecter

52. “Who can say? Best thing for him, really. His therapy was going nowhere.”- Hannibal Lecter

53. “Plum Island Animal Disease Research Center.” Sounds charming.”- Hannibal Lecter

54. “If I help you, Clarice, it will be ‘turns’ with us too. Quid pro quo. I tell you things, you tell me things. Not about this case, though. About yourself. Quid pro quo. Yes or no?”- Hannibal Lecter

55. “Punishment, you see, for Miggs. Like that Gospel Programme. When you’re gone they’ll turn the volume way up. Doctor Chiltern does enjoy his petty torments.”- Hannibal Lecter

56. “Garden-variety Manic Depressive. Tedious, very tedious. I did not kill him. I assure you just tucked him away, very much as I found him after he’d missed three appointments.”- Hannibal Lecter

57. “I’ve been in this room for eight years, now Clarice, and I know they’ll never let me out, not while I’m alive. What I want is a view where I can see a tree or even water. I want to be in a federal institution far away from Doctor Chiltern. I’ll help you catch him, Clarice.”- Hannibal Lecter

58. “I’ve waited, but how long can you and Jackie-boy wait? Our little Billy must already be looking for that next special someone.”- Hannibal Lecter

59. “Billy hates his own identity, you see.”- Hannibal Lecter

60. “But we don’t reckon time the same way, do we, Clarice?”- Hannibal Lecter

61. “It was… screaming. Some kind of screaming, like a child’s voice.”-  Clarice Starling

62. “I crept up into the barn. I was so scared to look inside, but I had to.”-  Clarice Starling

63. “Lambs. The lambs were screaming.”  Clarice Starling

64. “First I tried to free them. I… I opened the gate to their pen, but they wouldn’t run. They just stood there, confused. They wouldn’t run.”-  Clarice Starling

65. “I took one lamb, and I ran away as fast as I could.”-  Clarice Starling

66. “I didn’t have any food or any water and it was very cold, very cold. I thought, I thought if I could save just one, but… he was so heavy. So heavy. I didn’t get more than a few miles when the sheriff’s car picked me up. The rancher was so angry he sent me to live at the Lutheran orphanage in Bozeman. I never saw the ranch again.”-  Clarice Starling

67. “You see a lot, Doctor. But are you strong enough to point that high-powered perception at yourself? What about it? Why don’t you – why don’t you look at yourself and write down what you see? Or maybe you’re afraid to.”-  Clarice Starling

68. “Where are you, Dr. Lecter?”-  Clarice Starling

69. “It matters, Mr Crawford. Cops look at you to see how to act. It matters.”-  Clarice Starling

70. “Starling, when I told that sheriff we shouldn’t talk in front of a woman, that really burned you, didn’t it? It was just smoke, Starling. I had to get rid of him.”- Jack Crawford 

71. “Did you do all these drawings, Doctor?”-  Clarice Starling

72. “Memory, Agent Starling, is what I have instead of a view.”-  Hannibal Lecter

73. “Tell me his name, Doctor.”-  Clarice Starling

74. “What did Lecter say about… first principles?”-  Clarice Starling

75. “If you didn’t kill him, then who did, sir?”-  Clarice Starling

76. “Yes or no, Clarice? Poor little Catherine is waiting.”- Hannibal Lecter

77. “Hester Mofet. It’s an anagram, isn’t it, Doctor? Hester Mofet, ‘The rest of me’. ‘Miss the rest of me,’ meaning that you rented that garage?”-  Clarice Starling

78. “They don’t have a name for what he is.”-  Clarice Starling

79. “But I thought the ‘yourself’ reference was too hokey for Lecter, so I figured he’s from Baltimore, and I looked in the phone book, and there’s a ‘Your Self Storage’ facility, right outside of downtown Baltimore, sir.”-  Clarice Starling

80. “I remember you from my seminar at UVA. You grilled me pretty hard, as I recall, on the bureau’s civil rights record in the Hoover years. I gave you an A.”- Jack Crawford

81. “Oh, he’s a monster. Pure psychopath. So rare to capture one alive. From a research point of view, Lecter is our most prized asset.”- Frederick Chilton 

82. “I graduated from UVA, Captain; it’s not exactly a charm school.”-  Clarice Starling

83. “What do you do when you’re not detecting Agent Starling?”- Pilcher

84. “What do you mean fledgling killer?”-  Clarice Starling

85. “Do you mean he’s killed again?”-  Clarice Starling

86. “You know who he is, don’t you? Tell me who decapitated your patient.”-  Clarice Starling

87. “Yes, but then I would have missed the pleasure of your company.”-  Clarice Starling

88. “Doctor, we don’t have any more time for any of this now.”-  Clarice Starling

89. “What you are doing, Miss Starling is coming into my hospital to conduct an interview, and refusing to share information with me, for the third time.”- Frederick Chilton 

90. “If Lecter thinks you’re his enemy, maybe we’d have better luck if I went in by myself.”-  Clarice Starling

91. “You could have mentioned this in my office and saved me the time.”- Frederick Chilton 

92. “Don’t you leave me here, this guy is crazy!”- Catherine Martin 

93. “Catherine, you’ve gotta be quiet! Now, shut that dog up!”-  Clarice Starling

94. “FBI! You’re safe!”-  Clarice Starling

95. “I try to be a student, Dr. Pilcher.”-  Clarice Starling

96. “Are you hitting on me, doctor?”-  Clarice Starling

97. “Just do your job, but never forget what he is.”- Jack Crawford

98. “Is it true what they’re saying?”- Murray 

99. “Please mister, let me go! My family will give you anything you want!”- Catherine Martin

100. “It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.”- Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill

The Silence of the Lambs has created an unforgettable mark in cinematic history. With the movie’s chilling performances, intricate storytelling, and iconic characters like Dr. Hannibal Lecter, it remains a gripping benchmark for psychological thrillers.

Watch this psychological classic on Max or Amazon Prime Video!

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