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The novel’s titular lambs symbolize innocence, which Starling believes must be protected at all costs. After Starling’s father died when she was a 10, she was sent to live with some relatives who owned a ranch. Starling loved the animals on the ranch and was horrified when she learned that her relatives slaughtered them. As an adult, she still hears the lambs’ cries in her dreams. For Starling, the lambs are innocent creatures deserving of life. They have done nothing wrong and die for reasons they cannot comprehend. In her imagination, Starling links the lambs with the serial killer Buffalo Bill’s victims. Buffalo Bill skins his victims just as people sheer sheep for their wool. Additionally, like lambs being slaughtered, Buffalo Bill’s victims are innocent people who do not deserve what happens to them. In her meetings with Hannibal Lecter, Starling and Lecter talk about how the lambs might stop crying in Starling’s dreams if she can solve the Buffalo Bill case and save Catherine Baker Martin. At the end of the novel, Lecter writes a letter to Starling asking her if the lambs’ cries have stopped. Lecter suspects they have but predicts they will come back. Lecter’s prediction suggests that although Starling saved some innocent people, she will witness the slaughter of many more throughout her career.
Lambs Quotes in The Silence of the Lambs
The The Silence of the Lambs quotes below all refer to the symbol of Lambs. 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:
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Chapter 35
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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?
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Chapter 59
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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.
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Chapter 61
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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.
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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.
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Lambs Symbol Timeline in The Silence of the Lambs
The timeline below shows where the symbol Lambs appears in The Silence of the Lambs. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 35
...recalls waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of someone slaughtering lambs. The lambs’ cries made Starling realize that the horse she loved was about to be...
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...her to continue to tell him about her dreams. He wants to know if the lambs will ever stop shrieking.
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Chapter 47
...in the middle of the night because she has her recurring nightmare about the crying lambs. Try as she might to distance herself from the Buffalo Bill case, it will not...
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Chapter 61
...is the most intimate. He asks her to update him on her dreams about the lambs. He hopes she will put something in the newspapers so that he will have an...
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