The Silence of the Lambs

by

Thomas Harris

Clarice Starling Character Analysis

Clarice Starling is the protagonist of The Silence of the Lambs, an agent in training at the FBI Academy in Quantico. One of her superiors at the FBI, Jack Crawford, puts Starling on a case to help the FBI catch the serial killer Buffalo Bill. Starling is an intelligent and capable woman who jumps at any chance she gets to work in the field. She is careful and thoughtful about every decision she makes regarding her career because she knows that women who work for the FBI often get saddled with desk work. Starling wants to break the mold and become a field agent by whatever means necessary. As such, she engages in several conversations with Hannibal Lecter, an imprisoned psychiatrist turned serial killer who enjoys Starling’s company but also likes to toy with her. He gets her to reveal personal details, like the death of her father when she was 10 and a traumatic childhood experience where she tried in vain to save some lambs from being slaughtered. As intelligent as Lecter is, Starling always holds her own during their verbal sparring. Ultimately, she gets just as much out of him as he does her. Throughout the novel, her femininity proves to be an asset rather than a hindrance like many of her male colleagues presume. Because Buffalo Bill’s victims are women, Starling relates to them in ways her male counterparts cannot. As such, she is often more effective when performing searches and interviewing victims’ families. Despite her many capabilities, Starling does have her insecurities. In addition to her self-conscious position regarding her gender, Starling is also insecure about her class background. Starling grew up in the South with lower-class parents, a fact she usually tries to disguise. Starling loves her parents, but most of her current colleagues are from coastal cities and grew up quite wealthy. This insecurity is something Starling never entirely gets over, though she manages to tackle it head-on when Lecter confronts her with it.

Clarice Starling Quotes in The Silence of the Lambs

The The Silence of the Lambs quotes below are all either spoken by Clarice Starling or refer to Clarice Starling. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Sexism and Law Enforcement Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

Paperwork. Clarice Starling’s self-interest snuffled ahead like a keen beagle. She smelled a job offer coming—probably the drudgery of feeding raw data into a new computer system. It was tempting to get into Behavioral Science in any capacity she could, but she knew what happens to a woman if she’s ever pegged as a secretary—it sticks until the end of time. A choice was coming, and she wanted to choose well.

Related Characters: Clarice Starling, Jack Crawford
Page Number: 3-4
Explanation and Analysis:

“Do your job, just don’t ever forget what he is.”

“And what’s that? Do you know?”

“I know he’s a monster. Beyond that, nobody can say for sure.”

Related Characters: Clarice Starling (speaker), Jack Crawford (speaker), Hannibal Lecter
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences. You’ve given up good and evil for behaviorism, Officer Starling. You’ve got everybody in moral dignity pants—nothing is ever anybody’s fault. Look at me, Officer Starling. Can you stand to say I’m evil? Am I evil, Officer Starling?

Related Characters: Hannibal Lecter (speaker), Clarice Starling
Page Number: 21
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Hannibal Lecter (speaker), Clarice Starling
Page Number: 22
Explanation and Analysis:

You’d like to quantify me, Officer Starling. You’re so ambitious, aren’t you? Do you know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. You’re a well-scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste. Your eyes are like cheap birthstones—all surface shine when you stalk some little answer. And you’re bright behind them, aren’t you? Desperate not to be like your mother. Good nutrition has given you some length of bone, but you’re not more than one generation out of the mines, Officer Starling. Is it the West Virginia Starlings or the Okie Starlings, Officer? It was a toss-up between college and the opportunities in the Women’s Army Corps, wasn’t it? Let me tell you something specific about yourself, Student Starling. Back in your room, you have a string of gold add-a-beads and you feel an ugly little thump when you look at how tacky they are now, isn’t that so? All those tedious thank-yous, permitting all that sincere fumbling, getting all sticky once for every bead. Tedious. Tedious. Bo-o-o-o-r-i-ing. Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn’t it?

Related Characters: Hannibal Lecter (speaker), Clarice Starling
Page Number: 22
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Considering the face again, she believed she learned something that would last her. Looking with purpose at this face, with its tongue changing color where it touched the glass, was not as bad as Miggs swallowing his tongue in her dreams. She felt she could look at anything, if she had something positive to do about it. Starling was young.

Related Characters: Clarice Starling, Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill, Klaus
Page Number: 54
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

“Sheriff, this kind of a sex crime has some aspects that I’d rather say to you just between us men, you understand what I mean?” Crawford said, indicating Starling’s presence with a small movement. of his head. He hustled the smaller man into a cluttered office off the hall and closed the door. Starling was left to mask her umbrage before the gaggle of deputies. Her teeth hard together, she gazed on Saint Cecilia and returned the saint’s ethereal smile while eavesdropping through the door. She could hear raised voices, then scraps of a telephone conversation.

Related Characters: Jack Crawford (speaker), Clarice Starling
Page Number: 80-81
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

That’s not a guess. He’s very likely right, and he could have told you why, but he wanted to tease you with it. It’s the only weakness I ever saw in him—he has to look smart, smarter than anybody. He’s been doing it for years.

Related Characters: Jack Crawford (speaker), Clarice Starling, Hannibal Lecter, Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill
Page Number: 94
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

“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 wastes any other thing.’ It was a verb for destruction too... Is this what you do all the time—hunt Buffalo Bill?”

“I do it all I can.”

Related Characters: Clarice Starling (speaker), Noble Pilcher (speaker), Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill, Senator Ruth Martin
Related Symbols: Death’s Head Moths
Page Number: 106
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 22 Quotes

“What do your two disciplines tell you about Buffalo Bill?”

“By the book, he’s a sadist.”

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

Related Characters: Clarice Starling (speaker), Hannibal Lecter (speaker), Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill
Page Number: 146
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25 Quotes

“Clarice, he was working at night, in a pickup truck, armed only with a shotgun.... Tell me, did he wear a time clock on his belt by any chance? One of those things where they have keys screwed to posts all over town and you have to drive to them and stick them in your clock? So the town fathers know you weren’t asleep. Tell me if he wore one, Clarice.”

“Yes.”

“He was a night watchman, wasn’t he, Clarice, he wasn’t a marshal at all. I’ll know if you lie.”

“The job description said night marshal.”

Related Characters: Clarice Starling (speaker), Hannibal Lecter (speaker)
Page Number: 165
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 32 Quotes

When her pupils darkened, Dr. Lecter took a single sip of her pain and found it exquisite. That was enough for today.

Related Characters: Clarice Starling, Hannibal Lecter, Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill, Noble Pilcher, Senator Ruth Martin
Related Symbols: Death’s Head Moths
Page Number: 201
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 35 Quotes

“He covets. In fact, he covets being the very thing you are. It’s his nature to covet. How do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort at an answer.”

“No. We just—”

“No. Precisely so. We begin by coveting what we see every day. Don’t you feel eyes moving over you every day, Clarice, in chance encounters? I hardly see how you could not. And don’t your eyes move over things?”

Related Characters: Clarice Starling (speaker), Hannibal Lecter (speaker), Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill, Catherine Baker Martin
Page Number: 227
Explanation and Analysis:

Do you think if you caught Buffalo Bill yourself and if you made Catherine all right, you could make the lambs stop screaming, do you think they’d be all right too and you wouldn’t wake up again in the dark and hear the lambs screaming?

Related Characters: Hannibal Lecter (speaker), Clarice Starling, Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill, Catherine Baker Martin
Related Symbols: Lambs
Page Number: 230
Explanation and Analysis:

“Thank you, Clarice.”

“Thank you, Dr. Lecter.”

And that is how he remained in Starling’s mind. Caught in the instant when he did not mock. Standing in his white cell, arched like a dancer, his hands clasped in front of him and his head slightly to the side.

Related Characters: Clarice Starling (speaker), Hannibal Lecter (speaker)
Page Number: 231
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 48 Quotes

I’m as good as anybody you’ve got at the cop stuff, better at some things. The victims are all women and there aren’t any women working this. I can walk in a woman’s room and know three times as much about her as a man would know, and you know that’s a fact.

Related Characters: Clarice Starling (speaker), Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill, Jack Crawford
Page Number: 299
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 59 Quotes

From Dr. Frederick Chilton, the National Tattler bought the tapes of Starling’s interview with Dr. Hannibal Lecter. The Tattler expanded on their conversations for their “Bride of Dracula” series and implied that Starling had made frank sexual revelations to Lecter in exchange for information, spurring an offer to Starling from Velvet Talks: The Journal of Telephone Sex.

Related Characters: Clarice Starling, Dr. Chilton
Related Symbols: Lambs
Page Number: 360
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 61 Quotes

Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?

You owe me a piece of information, you know, and that’s what I’d like.

An ad in the national edition of the Times and in the International Herald-Tribune on the first of any month will be fine. Better put it in the China Mail as well.

I won’t be surprised if the answer is yes and no. The lambs will stop for now. But, Clarice, you judge yourself with all the mercy of the dungeon scales at Threave; you’ll have to earn it again and again, the blessed silence. Because it’s the plight that drives you, seeing the plight, and the plight will not end, ever.

I have no plans to call on you, Clarice, the world being more interesting with you in it. Be sure you extend me the same courtesy.

Related Characters: Hannibal Lecter (speaker), Clarice Starling, Noble Pilcher
Related Symbols: Lambs, Death’s Head Moths
Page Number: 366
Explanation and Analysis:

Far to the east, on the Chesapeake shore, Orion stood high in the clear night, above a big old house, and a room where a fire is banked for the night, its light pulsing gently with the wind above the chimneys. On a large bed there are many quilts and on the quilts and under them are several large dogs. Additional mounds beneath the covers may or may not be Noble Pilcher, it is impossible to determine in the ambient light. 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.

Related Characters: Clarice Starling, Noble Pilcher
Related Symbols: Lambs
Page Number: 367
Explanation and Analysis:
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The Silence of the Lambs PDF

Clarice Starling Quotes in The Silence of the Lambs

The The Silence of the Lambs quotes below are all either spoken by Clarice Starling or refer to Clarice Starling. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Sexism and Law Enforcement Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

Paperwork. Clarice Starling’s self-interest snuffled ahead like a keen beagle. She smelled a job offer coming—probably the drudgery of feeding raw data into a new computer system. It was tempting to get into Behavioral Science in any capacity she could, but she knew what happens to a woman if she’s ever pegged as a secretary—it sticks until the end of time. A choice was coming, and she wanted to choose well.

Related Characters: Clarice Starling, Jack Crawford
Page Number: 3-4
Explanation and Analysis:

“Do your job, just don’t ever forget what he is.”

“And what’s that? Do you know?”

“I know he’s a monster. Beyond that, nobody can say for sure.”

Related Characters: Clarice Starling (speaker), Jack Crawford (speaker), Hannibal Lecter
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences. You’ve given up good and evil for behaviorism, Officer Starling. You’ve got everybody in moral dignity pants—nothing is ever anybody’s fault. Look at me, Officer Starling. Can you stand to say I’m evil? Am I evil, Officer Starling?

Related Characters: Hannibal Lecter (speaker), Clarice Starling
Page Number: 21
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Hannibal Lecter (speaker), Clarice Starling
Page Number: 22
Explanation and Analysis:

You’d like to quantify me, Officer Starling. You’re so ambitious, aren’t you? Do you know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. You’re a well-scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste. Your eyes are like cheap birthstones—all surface shine when you stalk some little answer. And you’re bright behind them, aren’t you? Desperate not to be like your mother. Good nutrition has given you some length of bone, but you’re not more than one generation out of the mines, Officer Starling. Is it the West Virginia Starlings or the Okie Starlings, Officer? It was a toss-up between college and the opportunities in the Women’s Army Corps, wasn’t it? Let me tell you something specific about yourself, Student Starling. Back in your room, you have a string of gold add-a-beads and you feel an ugly little thump when you look at how tacky they are now, isn’t that so? All those tedious thank-yous, permitting all that sincere fumbling, getting all sticky once for every bead. Tedious. Tedious. Bo-o-o-o-r-i-ing. Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn’t it?

Related Characters: Hannibal Lecter (speaker), Clarice Starling
Page Number: 22
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

Considering the face again, she believed she learned something that would last her. Looking with purpose at this face, with its tongue changing color where it touched the glass, was not as bad as Miggs swallowing his tongue in her dreams. She felt she could look at anything, if she had something positive to do about it. Starling was young.

Related Characters: Clarice Starling, Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill, Klaus
Page Number: 54
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

“Sheriff, this kind of a sex crime has some aspects that I’d rather say to you just between us men, you understand what I mean?” Crawford said, indicating Starling’s presence with a small movement. of his head. He hustled the smaller man into a cluttered office off the hall and closed the door. Starling was left to mask her umbrage before the gaggle of deputies. Her teeth hard together, she gazed on Saint Cecilia and returned the saint’s ethereal smile while eavesdropping through the door. She could hear raised voices, then scraps of a telephone conversation.

Related Characters: Jack Crawford (speaker), Clarice Starling
Page Number: 80-81
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

That’s not a guess. He’s very likely right, and he could have told you why, but he wanted to tease you with it. It’s the only weakness I ever saw in him—he has to look smart, smarter than anybody. He’s been doing it for years.

Related Characters: Jack Crawford (speaker), Clarice Starling, Hannibal Lecter, Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill
Page Number: 94
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

“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 wastes any other thing.’ It was a verb for destruction too... Is this what you do all the time—hunt Buffalo Bill?”

“I do it all I can.”

Related Characters: Clarice Starling (speaker), Noble Pilcher (speaker), Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill, Senator Ruth Martin
Related Symbols: Death’s Head Moths
Page Number: 106
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 22 Quotes

“What do your two disciplines tell you about Buffalo Bill?”

“By the book, he’s a sadist.”

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

Related Characters: Clarice Starling (speaker), Hannibal Lecter (speaker), Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill
Page Number: 146
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25 Quotes

“Clarice, he was working at night, in a pickup truck, armed only with a shotgun.... Tell me, did he wear a time clock on his belt by any chance? One of those things where they have keys screwed to posts all over town and you have to drive to them and stick them in your clock? So the town fathers know you weren’t asleep. Tell me if he wore one, Clarice.”

“Yes.”

“He was a night watchman, wasn’t he, Clarice, he wasn’t a marshal at all. I’ll know if you lie.”

“The job description said night marshal.”

Related Characters: Clarice Starling (speaker), Hannibal Lecter (speaker)
Page Number: 165
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 32 Quotes

When her pupils darkened, Dr. Lecter took a single sip of her pain and found it exquisite. That was enough for today.

Related Characters: Clarice Starling, Hannibal Lecter, Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill, Noble Pilcher, Senator Ruth Martin
Related Symbols: Death’s Head Moths
Page Number: 201
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 35 Quotes

“He covets. In fact, he covets being the very thing you are. It’s his nature to covet. How do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort at an answer.”

“No. We just—”

“No. Precisely so. We begin by coveting what we see every day. Don’t you feel eyes moving over you every day, Clarice, in chance encounters? I hardly see how you could not. And don’t your eyes move over things?”

Related Characters: Clarice Starling (speaker), Hannibal Lecter (speaker), Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill, Catherine Baker Martin
Page Number: 227
Explanation and Analysis:

Do you think if you caught Buffalo Bill yourself and if you made Catherine all right, you could make the lambs stop screaming, do you think they’d be all right too and you wouldn’t wake up again in the dark and hear the lambs screaming?

Related Characters: Hannibal Lecter (speaker), Clarice Starling, Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill, Catherine Baker Martin
Related Symbols: Lambs
Page Number: 230
Explanation and Analysis:

“Thank you, Clarice.”

“Thank you, Dr. Lecter.”

And that is how he remained in Starling’s mind. Caught in the instant when he did not mock. Standing in his white cell, arched like a dancer, his hands clasped in front of him and his head slightly to the side.

Related Characters: Clarice Starling (speaker), Hannibal Lecter (speaker)
Page Number: 231
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 48 Quotes

I’m as good as anybody you’ve got at the cop stuff, better at some things. The victims are all women and there aren’t any women working this. I can walk in a woman’s room and know three times as much about her as a man would know, and you know that’s a fact.

Related Characters: Clarice Starling (speaker), Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill, Jack Crawford
Page Number: 299
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 59 Quotes

From Dr. Frederick Chilton, the National Tattler bought the tapes of Starling’s interview with Dr. Hannibal Lecter. The Tattler expanded on their conversations for their “Bride of Dracula” series and implied that Starling had made frank sexual revelations to Lecter in exchange for information, spurring an offer to Starling from Velvet Talks: The Journal of Telephone Sex.

Related Characters: Clarice Starling, Dr. Chilton
Related Symbols: Lambs
Page Number: 360
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 61 Quotes

Well, Clarice, have the lambs stopped screaming?

You owe me a piece of information, you know, and that’s what I’d like.

An ad in the national edition of the Times and in the International Herald-Tribune on the first of any month will be fine. Better put it in the China Mail as well.

I won’t be surprised if the answer is yes and no. The lambs will stop for now. But, Clarice, you judge yourself with all the mercy of the dungeon scales at Threave; you’ll have to earn it again and again, the blessed silence. Because it’s the plight that drives you, seeing the plight, and the plight will not end, ever.

I have no plans to call on you, Clarice, the world being more interesting with you in it. Be sure you extend me the same courtesy.

Related Characters: Hannibal Lecter (speaker), Clarice Starling, Noble Pilcher
Related Symbols: Lambs, Death’s Head Moths
Page Number: 366
Explanation and Analysis:

Far to the east, on the Chesapeake shore, Orion stood high in the clear night, above a big old house, and a room where a fire is banked for the night, its light pulsing gently with the wind above the chimneys. On a large bed there are many quilts and on the quilts and under them are several large dogs. Additional mounds beneath the covers may or may not be Noble Pilcher, it is impossible to determine in the ambient light. 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.

Related Characters: Clarice Starling, Noble Pilcher
Related Symbols: Lambs
Page Number: 367
Explanation and Analysis: