Daniel Handler Quotations | Page 2

The library was one enormous room, with long, high metal shelves and the perfect quiet that libraries provide for anyone looking for an answer.

It is very easy to say that the important thing is to try your best, but if you are in real trouble the most important thing is not trying your best, but getting to safety.

What happens in a certain place can stain your feelings for that location, just as ink can stain a white sheet.

When you say, "History is written by the winners," you like to think about someone who isn't you. You want to think, "Oh, that's the juggernaut I'm standing against." But you're probably part of it.

I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence, and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong.

A mystery is solved with a story.

who would dare think that, forever? Some idiot girl who wouldn’t know how things played out.

I wrote Rick before I was published, and I had no vision of it, really. It was just a story that occurred to me, and that put its little claws in my brain, and I wrote it, and I showed it to a couple people, and they all said, "This is ghastly."

Dumping you times infinity. Still not enough.

Is it OK not to be a virgin, yes. Most people aren’t virgins, Min. That’s why there’s people to begin with.

I’m not a cuckoo, either. I’m a fool is what.

Adverbs is a book about love, and I thought that was pretty cheerful, but people who are reading it now are telling me that it's actually quite dark.

Twenty-six,” you said. “One for each day we’ve been together, Min.”Somebody oohed. Somebody shushed them. “And I hope that someday I’ll do another something stupid and I’ll have to say it a million times because that’s how long it’ll be, together with you, Min. With you.

Knowing that something is wrong and doing it anyway happens very often in life, and I doubt I will ever know why.

Tears are curious things, for like earthquakes or puppet shows, they can occur at any time, without any warning and without any good reason.

Even the best plans can change if there's an accident.

That night was a dark day. Of course, all nights are dark days, because night is simply a badly lit version of day, ...

If you don’t care about something, one way to demonstrate your feelings is to say the word and then repeat the word with the letters S-C-H-M replacing the first letters. Somebody who didn’t care about dentists, for instance could say ‘Dentist, schmentists.

I think we'll always miss our parents. But I think we can miss them without being miserable all the time. After all, they wouldn't want us to be miserable.

...the moron who thought love was forever.

I wrote a comedy, which hopefully [Rick director] Curtiss Clayton will bring to the screen, that I thought was the antithesis of all my work. I thought it was light and sunshiny, and Mr. Clayton reminded me that it is the story of a woman kidnapped and forced to do things against her will, which is not what most people think of as light and sunshiny.

I opened my mouth and kissed you then, the first time all night, attacked you and surrendered completely, and let’s get out of here. I’m ready, I’m finished, let’s not break up, no, no. Take me home, my boyfriend, my love.

I am heartbroken, but I have been heartbroken before, and this might be the best for which I can hope.

We are respecting our parents' wishes....They didn't want to shelter us from the world's treacheries. They wanted us to survive them.

It's funny, particularly when you're a writer and you're doing well, you have that sense of like, "Oh! My view of the world is the one that's going to be published."

It is not always the job of people shouting outside impressive buildings to solve problems. It is often the job of the people inside, who have paper, pens, desks, and an impressive view.

Never, under any circumstances, let the Virginian wolfsnake near a typewriter.

...that's not why we broke up. I love it, I miss it, I hate to give it back to you, this complicated thing, it's why we stayed together

When you start reading nonfiction books about piracy, you realize that it's actually just a history of desperate people.

Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending.

An Overall Feeling of Doom that One Cannot Ever Escape no Matter What One Does

I stand entwined in fire on the inextinguishable bonfire of inconceivable love.

For every teenager I know, having a phone is a mixed blessing, because your parents can press a button and figure out where you are.

There is no way of knowing for sure whether or not you can trust someone, for the simple reason that circumstances change all of the time.

I didn't realize this was a sad occasion.

Sometimes, even the best of plans will occur to you when it is too late.

I think pirates, like astronauts, particularly for a boy, are always kind of worth thinking about.

You can't believe everything you read.

If you know somebody very well, like your grandmother or your baby sister, you will know when they are real and when they are fake.

13. 99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree.

Count Olaf sounds like an awful person. I hope he is torn apart by wild animals someday. Wouldn't that be satisfying?

People worry more about girls, for a good reason: I don't think my parents thought I was going to be raped by a classmate or attacked when I was walking alone in some neighborhood. So it's not just paranoid parents.

If only Uncle Monty knew what we know," Violet said, "and Stephano knew that he knew what we know. But Uncle Monty doesn't know what we know, and Stephano knows that he doesn't know what we know." "I know," Klause said. "I know you know," Violet said

The worst surroundings in the world can be tolerated if the people in them are interesting and kind.

There are many reasons, of course, why someone might snap their fingers and grin. If you heard some pleasing music, for instance, you might snap your fingers and grin to demonstrate that the music had charms that could soothe your savage breast. If you were employed as a spy, you might snap your fingers and grin in order to deliver a message in secret snapping-and-grinning code.

-Most people would say that she's beautiful. -That's because she's been with most people.

I stayed there loving you, though the love made me, not sad but I guess melancholy, for a reason I couldn’t point to.

And then like a song we'd forgotten was even on the mix, you stepped into the house and my whole life.

In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.

Mostly, it's flattering to meet fans. As long as it's in a planned, professional meeting, rather than, say, someone dropping by my home, which is not as pleasant.

Accidents happen all the time.

For Beatrice, I cherished, you perished, The world's been nightmarished.

Help me,' Allison says, but she is soft-spoken, and everyone she loves is so far away.

My general writing preface is to write an outline and then ignore about half of it, both on a micro level with the individual book, and on a macro level with the series as a whole, and that's pretty much what's happened.

Chestnuts in stuffing tastes like someone chewed up a tree branch and then French-kissed it into your mouth.

Count Olaf certainly does sound evil. Imagine forcing children to stand near a stove!

The story of the Baudelaires takes place in a very real world, where some people are laughed at just because they have something wrong with them, and where children can find themselves all alone in the world, struggling to understand the mystery that surrounds them.

My work is very dear to me, and certainly I have had all the emotional highs and lows that go with trying to get it to an audience. But I do have some kind of detachment that seems somewhat unusual in my trade. I'm a writer who writes every day. I don't have a period of months where I can't get anything done and I wander around tearing my hair out. When I come back from a book tour, for instance, I might have one day where I sleep late and then check my e-mail, and then go for a walk, and then the next day I'm really itching to get back at writing a story.

Never mind what my name is,” the man said. “No one can pronounce it anyway. Just call me Sir.

Put your hair up, Min. The secret ingredient is not your hair.

If he’s not gay and he hung out with you the whole time, he wanted to be. It’s boyfriend or want to be boyfriend or I guess gay. Those are the choices.

I often can't remember which scenes are and aren't in the final product, because I saw so many different versions of the Lemony Snicket that I forget which ended up on the cutting-room floor.

I am so tired, I can hardly type these worfs.

Goodness! Golly! Good God! Blessed Allah! Zeus and Hera! Mary and Joseph! Nathaniel Hawthorne! Don't touch her! Grab her! Move closer! Run away! Don't move! Kill the snake! Leave it alone! Give it some food! Don't let it bite her! Lure the snake away! Here, snakey! Here, snakey snakey!

If you try to avoid every instance of peer pressure you will end up without any peers whatsoever, and the trick is to succumb to enough pressure that you do not drive your peers away, but not so much that you end up in a situation in which you are dead or otherwise uncomfortable. This is a difficult trick, and most people never master it, and end up dead or uncomfortable at least once during their lives.

What you don't read is often as important as what you do read.

I do think of emotions as being on a circular path, so you can feel terrible and terrible and terrible, and then all of a sudden it becomes quite funny.

I can see it, Ed, I leaned deeper into you, felt you nodding along with the sounds in the room, and your warmth signaled through to me from under your shirt, lovely strong, safe and right.

...and then of course the music sprang up, lousy rock as bold and dull as a giant potato. “Love this song,” Todd said, like it was unusually brave to like what was number one on the radio...

The expression "following suit" is a curious one, because it has nothing to do with walking behind a matching set of clothing. If you follow suit, it means you do the same thing somebody else has just done. If all of your friends decided to jump off a bridge into the icy waters of an ocean or river, for instance, and you jumped in right after them, you would be following suit. You can see why following suit can be a dangerous thing to do, because you could end up drowning simply because somebody else thought of it first.

Grammar is the greatest joy in life, don't you find?

It is always tedious when someone tells you that if you don't stop crying, they will give you something to cry about, because if you are crying then you already have something to cry about, and so there is no reason for them to give you anything additional to cry about, thank you very much.

It was a secret time and place, you next to me, untraceable and out of this world

There are two types of panicking: standing still and not saying a word, and leaping all over the place babbling anything that comes into your head.

I like to think that I get better and better as a writer, but it seems pretty easy to me to slip on disguises of various people.

Stop saying no offense,” I said, “when you say offensive things. It’s not a free pass.

I liked, I admit, that we didn’t pretend there hadn’t been other girls. There was always a girl on you in the halls at school, like they came free with a backpack.

The whole thing of what I’ve been trying,” you said, “is that you’re different, and you keep asking about the other girls, but what I mean is that I don’t think about them, because of the way you are.

If I were to say, "Yes, I am a fascinating, erudite person," what would that say about me? I don't know.

To stutter through it with you or even stop stuttering and say nothing, was so lucky and soft, better talk than mile-a-minute with anyone. After a few minutes we’d stop rattling, we’d adjust, we’d settle in, and the conversation would speed into the night.

Everyone on earth would never starve and forever find love and happiness, since we won, but if we’d lost, they would have gouged out our eyes and thrown us naked onto hot coals and poisonous snakes for all the cheering and hugging at the end, strangers hugging like the end of The Omega Virus when Steve Sturmine finds the antidote.

Are you who I think you are?

I've never had a musical career. So I think it's been unaffected. I play the accordion. In terms of thinking of it as a musical career, I think it's sort of like calling yourself an astronaut because you have a shiny suit.

A girl meets a boy, Ed, and everything changes, or so she says.

Frustration is an interesting emotional state, because it tends to bring out the worst in whoever is frustrated.

You know I want to be a director, but you could never truly see the movies in my head and that, Ed, is why we broke up.

I'm not very good at the accordion. If I played guitar, I wouldn't be on anyone's album. But because I play the accordion and no one else does, I end up doing strange things.

I know you can't see it, not you, Ed, but maybe if I tell you the whole plot you'll understand it this once, because even now I want you to see it. I don't love you anymore, of course I don't, but there's still something I can show you. You know I want to be a director, but you never truly see the movies in my head and that, Ed, is why we broke up.

Take it back, Ed. Take it all back.

I wore it, this careless thing you don't even remember giving to me from your bag. It wasn't a gift, this thing I'm returning. It was barely a gesture, almost forgotten already, this thing I wore like it was dear to me. And it was. No wonder we broke up.

The file clanked against me, my stupid idea nobody would have gotten had I ever done it. You even wouldn't have gotten it, Ed, I thought, watching her go. It's why we broke up, so here it is. Ed, how could you?

The Edith Head Trio, I would say, would be even less of a musical career than playing the accordion, particularly because I played the accordion in The Edith Head Trio. I'm very impressed by your Googling. The Edith Head Trio and another band, Tzamboni, were two bands I was in after college that played at tiny clubs to little acclaim. Our Gypsy tango version of "When Doves Cry" was our biggest hit.But we were not destined for greatness.

It doesn't take courage to kill someone,' Klaus said. 'It takes a severe lack of moral stamina.

If everyone fought fire with fire, the whole world would go up in smoke.

Troublesome things tend to remain troublesome no matter how many times you do them.

There are many things in life that become different if you take a long look at them.

One cannot spend forever sitting and solving the mysteries of oone's history.

If you wish to avoid an unpleasant story you had best put this book down

Desperation is like a spilled drink; even if it's delicious, no one will get near it. Cultivate an aura of glamorous unapproachability.

I was once almost forced off the stage at a large chain bookstore that shall remain nameless, because she introduced me as Lemony Snicket, and I immediately interrupted her and said, "Oh no, Lemony Snicket isn't here," and then she tried to cancel the event right then and there.