Daniel Handler citations

“I’d ruin any day, all my days, for those long nights with you, and I did.”

“How do you forget something? You just walk away from it, those who are still alive. There are so few clearings in our hearts and minds, so few places where something can't grow on top of whatever happened to us before, and this is love too.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“… the moron who thought love was forever.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”