Quotes from book
Adverbs

Name: Adverbs
Author: Daniel Handler

Daniel Handler

Adverbs is a 2006 novel by Daniel Handler. It is formatted as a collection of seventeen interconnected narratives from the points of view of different people in various sorts of love. Each of the titles is an adverb suggesting what sort of love the people are dealing with. Some people are "wrongly" in love, others are "briefly" in love, and so on. The book focuses on the ways that people fall in love, instead of focusing on whom they are in love with.

“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.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Source: Adverbs

“Love was in the air so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Source: Adverbs (2006), Immediately

“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?”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Source: Adverbs

“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.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Source: Adverbs (2006), Judgmentally

“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.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Source: Adverbs

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

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Source: Adverbs

“Everybody has a theory.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Source: Adverbs

“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.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Source: Adverbs (2006), Collectively

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

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Source: Adverbs

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

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Source: Adverbs

“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.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Source: Adverbs

“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.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Source: Adverbs

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

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Source: Adverbs

“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.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Source: Adverbs

“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.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

Source: Adverbs (2006), Truly
Context: If you follow the diamond in my mother's ring from Africa to Germany to California to Arizona to Wisconsin, in the heel of a grandmother, in the beak of a magpie, in the gravel of the path, in someone else's novel, in the center of the earth where the volcanoes are from, you would forget the miracle, the reason diamonds end up in people's fingers in the first place. 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.