Daniel Handler Quotes

“Friends can make you feel that the world is smaller and less sneaky than it really is.”

“If you have ever peeled an onion, then you know that the first thin, papery layer reveals another thin, papery layer, and that layer reveals another, and another, and before you know it you have hundreds of layers all over the kitchen table and thousands of tears in your eyes, sorry that you ever started peeling in the first place and wishing that you had left the onion alone to wither away on the shelf of the pantry while you went on with your life, even if that meant never again enjoying the complicated and overwhelming taste of this strange and bitter vegetable.

In this way, the story of the Baudelaire orphans is like an onion, and if you insist on reading each and every thin, papery layer in A Series of Unfortunate Events, your only reward will be 170 chapters of misery in your library and countless tears in your eyes. Even if you have read the first twelve volumes of the Baudelaires' story, it is not too late to stop peeling away the layers, and to put this book back on the shelf to wither away while you read something less complicated and overwhelming. The end of this unhappy chronicle is like its bad beginning, as each misfortune only reveals another, and another, and another, and only those with the stomach for this strange and bitter tale should venture any farther into the Baudelaire onion. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes.”

“No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don't read is often as important as what you do read. For instance, if you are walking in the mountains, and you don't read the sign that says "Beware of Cliff" because you were busy reading a joke book instead, you may suddenly find yourself walking on air rather than on a sturdy bed of rocks. If you are baking a pie for your friends, and you read an article entitled "How to Build a Chair" instead of a cookbook, your pie will probably end up tasting like wood and nails instead of like crust and fruity filling. And if you insist on reading this book instead of something more cheerful, you will most certainly find yourself moaning in despair instead of wriggling with delight, so if you have any sense at all you will put this book down and pick up another one. I know of a book, for instance, called The Littlest Elf, which tells the story of a teensy-weensy little man who scurries around fairyland having all sorts of adorable adventures, and you can see at once that you should probably read The Littlest Elf and wriggle over the lovely things that happened to this imaginary creature in a made-up place, instead of reading this book and moaning over the terrible things that have happened to the three Baudelaire orphans.”

“Olaf: Of course I'm trying to trick you! That's the way of the world, Baudelaires. Everyone runs around with their secrets and their schemes, trying to outwit everyone else. Ishmael outwitted me, and put me in this cage. But I know how to outwit him and all his islander friends. If you let me out, I can be king of Olaf-Land, and you three can be my new henchfolk.”

“Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the crimes, follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother's wombs, and there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women.”

“… the moron who thought love was forever.”

“when I think about sex, you know, I want it to feel good. Not feel good, shut up, but right. Happy, not just banging away somewhere. You know, you should not just do it to do it. You should love the guy.”

“But there was more, as there always is when the love goes. She was haunted, naturally. Otherwise what is the point, why leave your rickety house, and why this yo-yo world giving us things and yanking them back?”

“Every last souvenir of the love we had, the prizes & the debris of this relationship, like the glitter in the gutter when the parade has passed, all the everything & whatnot kicked to the curb.”

“They say love's like a bus, and if you wait long enough another one will come along, but not in this place where the buses are slow and most of the cute ones are gay.”

“It is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes; it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe.”

“This is love if it's not with you, a terrible fiery something that makes people look away, and it feels like a punch in the throat.”

“You meet people who are in pain in life and love and you forgive them for behaving the way they do.”

“People aren't either wicked or noble," the hook-handed man said. They're like chef's salad, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.”

“If you are like most people, you have an assortment of friends and family you can call upon in times of trouble. For instance, if you woke up in the middle of the night and saw a masked woman trying to crawl through your bedroom window, you might call your mother or father to help you push her back out. If you found yourself hopelessly lost in the middle of a strange city, you might ask the police to give you a ride home. And if you were an author locked in an Italian restaurant that was slowly filling up with water, you might call upon your acquaintances in the locksmith, pasta, and sponge businesses to come and rescue you.”

“Halloween seems to last forever, until it is finally time to put on one's costume and demand candy from strangers.”

“For Beatrice--When we were together I felt breathless. Now, you are.-Lemony Snicket”

“I was stupid, the official descriptive phrase for happy.”

“The thing with your heart's desire is that your heart doesn't even know what it desires until it turns up.”

“I started making plans, thinking we would get that far.”

“A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded.”

“I'm telling you why we broke up, Ed. I'm writing this letter, the whole truth of why it happened. And the truth is that I goddamn loved you so much.”

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

“You either have the feeling or you don’t.”

“Someone can break your heart, leave you dead on the lawn, and still you never learn what to say to stop it all over again.”

“This is like a cookie, it tastes like a cookie having sex with a doughnut.”

“They looked at each other like a pair of parentheses.”

“This is love, to sit with someone you've known forever in a place you've been meaning to go, and watching as their life happens to them until you stand up and it's time to go.”

“I hadn't even been looking, not for you, and now you were my heart's desire.”

“Undeveloped, the whole thing, tossed into a box before we really had a chance to know what we had, and that's why we broke up.”

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

“Take back the smile and the night, take it all back, I wish I could.”

“Take it back, Ed. Take it all back.”

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

“… there's not enough ink and paper to say all I wanted.”

“But it’s December now, and the sky is bright, and it’s clear to me. I’m telling you why we broke up, Ed. I’m writing it in this letter, the whole truth of why it happened. And the truth is that I goddamn loved you so much.”

“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.”

“So she loved him. She just did immediately and again often and clearly naturally and soundly and obviously and many others.”

“I have a dream of what would have happened if what happened instead hadn't.”

“I want to love you and take you pretty places. Yes, I have things wrong, but also I can walk through walls if you'll let me show you.”

“Love is candy from a stranger, but it's candy you've had before and it probably won't kill you.”

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

“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.”

“Why not rise from the grave and terrorize a little instead of staying buried and dead in the cemetery?”

“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.”

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

“Everything else has vanished, so you take them now. Maybe if you're the one keeping them, I'll be the one feeling better.”

“She had the look in her eye when you kick and kick at the door and it doesn't open, when you write a boy letters and letters and he never loves you, not ‘til the day he dies. Not even then.”

“… 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”

“After a certain age, you couldn't even say where you were from. You went someplace, and lived there. And then you went someplace else.”

“Numbersign questionmark you" and "Asterisk exclamation point the world.”

“… everyone was right about you- prove them wrong.”

“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.”

“Let’s go, let’s go together toward something extraordinary and I started making plans, thinking we would get that far.”

“I gasped and pointed the way. I gave you an adventure, Ed, right in front of you but you never saw it until I showed you, and that's why we broke up.”

“Love can smack you like a seagull, and pour all over your feet like junkmail. You can't be ready for such a thing any more than salt water taffy gets you ready for the ocean.”

“Everybody has a theory.”

“Here we are at the bottom, almost empty. It's like confetti, these dried remnants you find in the street for a party no one invited you to. But they used to be, I can admit, part of something beautiful.”

“But just suddenly I really, really needed to see you again right that minute, that night.”

“Why, you're all grown up! The last time I saw you I was trying to throw thumbtacks into your cradle!”

“For Beatrice--I would much prefer it if you were alive and well.”

“All love gets over, and we must get over it.”

“In this large and fierce world of ours, there are many, many unpleasant places to be. You can be in a river swarming with angry electric eels, or in a supermarket filled with vicious long-distance runners. You can be in a hotel that has no room service, or you can be lost in a forest that is slowly filling up with water. You can be in a hornet's nest or in an abandoned airport or the office of a pediatric surgeon, but one of the most unpleasant things that can happen is to find yourself in a quandary.”

“"Oh my god!" Hillary is standing in the doorway of the bathroom of the bathroom which on one had is surprising but there's the other hand, too.”

“What can be hidden in a book?”

“It's hard for decent people to stay angry at someone who has burst into tears, which is why it is often a good idea to burst into tears if a decent person is yelling at you.”