Chapter Text
Thanks to hughmikkelsen for giving me this idea, which is way easier than some kind of end notes situation that was never going to happen no matter what I said at the beginning. Hope this is okay!
These are the notes I took while researching to write this fanfic. Also, Scarface and Natural Born Killers had some significant impact. There were probably more notes, but I lost them, or they were just underlined in books I kept by my desk while writing, or they were things I had memorized. Anyway, I wanted to include references at one point when I first started writing, to credit the original works, but the further in I got the more overwhelming that idea became. So here’s my notes instead, for anyone who wants to read them. They don’t include all the lines I adapted or quoted from the show, but you probably recognized all those. I feel kind of silly publishing this, let alone after all this time, but here you go anyway. Maybe more than one person will find it interesting, and if not, that’s okay, too.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! Oh, and if you’re a Fannibal and you haven’t seen Natural Born Killers, do yourself a favor.
Thomas Harris
The world will not be this way within the reach of my arm. - Hannibal
Hannibal had entered his heart’s long winter. He slept soundly and was not visited in dreams as humans are. - Hannibal Rising
His empty hands hanging palms forward at his sides, he stood at the window looking to the empty east. He did not look for dawn; east was only the way the window faced. - Silence of the Lambs
Mixed hungers crossed his face; it was Krendler’s nature to both appreciate Starling’s leg & look for the hamstring. - Hannibal
Curious how things can work on you even when you recognize them. - Silence of the Lambs
Nothing made me happen. I happened. - Silence of the Lambs
Inattention can be a stratagem to avoid pain, and that is often misread as shallowness and indifference. - Silence of the Lambs
“Did you ever think, Clarice, why the Phillistines don’t understand you? It’s because you are the answer to Samson’s riddle. You are the honey in the lion.” - Silence of the Lambs
“Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn’t it?” - Silence of the Lambs
“How seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home.” - Red Dragon
“Intense fear comes in waves; the body can’t stand it for long at a time.” - Red Dragon
NB: There were definitely more than this. I still have my copies of the books, and I checked to see if I underlined things, but I actually just dogeared pages. Oops. But probably a lot of you have read the books and recognize the quotes, anyway.
Homer
Of all the creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.
The difficulty is not so great to die for a friend as to find a friend worth dying for.
There will be killing till the score is paid.
Fool, prate not to me about covenants. There can be no covenants between men and lions, wolves and lambs can never be of one mind, but hate each other out and out and through.
The blade itself incites to deeds of violence.
Any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.
His descent was like nightfall.
Immortals are never alien to one another.
Still, we will let all this be a thing of the past, though it hurts us, and beat down by constraint the anger that rises inside us. Now I am making an end of my anger. It does not become me, unrelentingly, to rage on.
Aeschylus
And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
…such grace is harsh and violent
She brought to Ilium her dowry, destruction
I think the slain care little if they sleep or rise
Call no man happy till he is dead
He collapsed, snorting his life away,
Spitting great gobs of blood all over me,
Drenching me in showers of his dark blood.
And I rejoiced - just as the fecund earth
Rejoices when the heavens send spring rains
And new-born flower buds burst into bloom.
He’s a corpse, the work of this right hand, a work of justice.
You’re too ambitious, far too arrogant. Blood-drenched murder’s made you man. That’s plain. Your eyes are full of blood. Now stroke for stroke you’ll pay for what you’ve done. You’ve lost your friends, you’ve lost your honor…
Living, you will be my feast, not slain at an altar.
Euripides
That which is beyond us, which is greater than the human, the unattainably great, is for the mad, or those who listen to the mad, and then believe them. - Bacchae
The company of just and righteous men is better than wealth and a rich estate -Aegeus
Waste no fresh tears over old griefs - Alexander
I sacrifice to no god save myself - and to my belly, greatest of deities - the Cyclops
Nothing has more strength than dire necessity - Helen
Thy form is the reflection of thy nature - Ion
Every man is like the company he is won’t to keep - Phoenix
Who dares not speak his free thoughts is a slave - The Phoenician Women
I have found power in the mysteries of thought,
Exaltation in the changing of the muses;
I have been versed in the reasonings of men;
But fate is stronger than anything I have known - Alcestis
Cleverness is not wisdom - Bacchae
Do not mistake the rule of force for true power. Men are not shaped by force. - Bacchae
What we understand is that society must allow room for the irrational, in healthy balance with the rational. - Bacchae
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
…beautiful things mean only Beauty.
No artist has ethical sympathies.
All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
We shall sugar for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.
You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose.
Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.
To influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed.
The bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself.
We are punished for our refusals.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.
Jane Eyre
“Jane be still; don’t struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation.”
“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.”
“If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.”
“I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you - especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come braid between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snap; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you - you’d forget me.”
Conventionality is not morality.
He was the first to recognize me, and to love what he saw.
He is not to them what he is to me . . . he is not of their kind. I believe he is of mine - I am sure he is - I feel akin to him - I understand the language of his countenance and movements: though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him.
“I have little left in myself - I must have you. The world may laugh - may call me absurd, selfish - but it does not signify. My very soul demands you: it will not be satisfied, or it will take deadly vengeance on its frame.”
“Laws and principles are not for the times when there is not temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigor . . . If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?”
“Then you are mistaken, and you know nothing about me, and nothing about the sort of love of which I am capable. Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still: if you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat - your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me. . . I should receive you in an embrace at least as fond as it would be restrictive.”
Other
He who dares not grasp the thorn
Should never crave the rose
- Anne Brontë
Let me twine
Mine arms about that body, where against
My grained ash a hundred times hath broke
And searr’d the moon with splinters: here I clip
The anvil of my sword, and do contest
As hotly and as nobly with thy love
As ever in ambitious strength I did
Contend against thy valour. Know thou first,
I loved the maid I married; never man
Sigh’d truer breath; but that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold.
- Shakespeare, Corialinus
If e’er again I meet him beat to beard, He’s mine and I am his
- Shakespeare, Corialinus
I think he’ll be to Rome as is the osprey to the fish, who takes it by sovereignty of nature
- Shakespeare, Corialinus
Why did you wish me milder? Would you have me false to my nature? Rather say I play the man I am.
- Shakespeare, Corialinus
He stopped the flyers
And by his rare example made the coward
turn terror into sport . . .
. . . from face to foot
He was a thing of blood, whose every motion
Was timed with dying cries
-Shakespeare, Corialinus
The dust of many strange desires
Lies between us; in our eyes
Dead smoke of perishable fires
Flickers, a fume in air and skies,
A steam of sighs
- A.C. Swinburne
I said, ‘She must be swift & white,
And subtly warm, and have perverse,
And sweet like sharp soft fruit to bite,
And like a snake’s love lithe and fierce.’
Men have guessed worse.
- A.C. Swinburne
Men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things
. . .
And shall I take a thing so blind
Embrace her as my natural good,
Or crush her, like a vice of blood,
Upon the threshold of the mind?
- Tennyson
Ask nothing more of me, sweet;
All I can give you I give.
Heart of my heart, were it more,
More would be laid at your feet —
Love that should help you to live,
Song that should spur you to soar.
- A.C. Swinburne
O lips that mine have grown into
Like April’s kissing May,
O fervent eyelids letting through
Those eyes the greenest of things blue,
The bluest of things grey,
If you were I and I were you,
How could I love you, say?
How could the rose leaf love the rue,
The day love nightfall and her dew,
Though night may love the day?
- A.C. Swinburne
And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit.
- Ecclesiastes