Daniel Handler Quotes

153 Sourced Quotes

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

Daniel Handler
For Beatrice—When we met, my life began. Soon afterwards, yours ended

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

Daniel Handler
This is love, moving to where the money is, and all the while a volcano or an ex-girlfriend might blow the whole thing to hell, as the Americans say. As everybody says.

Daniel Handler
How wrong to think I was anyone else, like thinking grass stains make you a beautiful view, like getting kissed makes you kissable, like feeling warm makes you coffee, like liking movies makes you a director. How utterly incorrect to think it any other way, a box of crap is treasures, a boy smiling means it, a gentle moment is a life improved.

Daniel Handler
Take back the smile and the night, take it all back, I wish I could.

Daniel Handler
Adam hates Tomas and tried to get Eddie to join him in hate. It hasn't worked, although Eddie will admit certain shortcomings, and the two men have not met until now, in the forest, when Adam has decided that Tomas in Eddie's stories and the Tomas in this story are the same man.

Daniel Handler
She said, "We're detectives" in the tone of voice that someone might say, "Making you happy isn't making me happy"

Daniel Handler
God, or somebody, what is it with terrible things? If you made this world why not a better one?

Daniel Handler
As the aphorism says, If you have to ask, you can't afford it.

Daniel Handler
This is love, and the trouble with it: it can make you embarrassed. Love is really liking someone a whole lot and not wanting to screw that up. Everybody's chewed over this. This unites us, this part of love.

Daniel Handler
The world is a harum-scarum place."
"Harum?" Sunny asked.
It's complicated and confusing," Olivia explained. They say that long ago it was simple and quiet, but that might be a legend.

Daniel Handler
I'll have ten grams of rice, Mrs. Bass interrupted, one tenth of a hectogram of shrimp vindaloo, a dekagram of chana aloo masala, one thousand centigrams of tandori salmon, four samosas with surface area of nineteen cubic centimeters, five deciliters of mango lassi, and a sada rava dosai that's exactly nineteen centimeters long.

Daniel Handler
Stealing, of course, is a crime, and a very impolite thing to do. But like most impolite things, it is excusable under certain circumstances. Stealing is not excusable if, for instance, you are in a museum and you decide that a certain painting would look better in your house, and you simply grab the painting and take it there. But if you were very, very hungry, and you had no way of obtaining money, it might be excusable to grab the painting, take it to your house, and eat it. -Lemony Snicket

Daniel Handler
"I love you, too" David said and took the bottle.
"I want you to love me in particular," Helena said

Daniel Handler
The pages of this book, I'm sorry to inform you, contain such unpleasantries as a giant pincer machine, a bad casserole, a man with a cloud of smoke where his head should be, a hypnotist, a terrible accident resulting in injury, and coupons.

Daniel Handler
Who would dare think that, forever? Some idiot girl who wouldn't know how things played out.

Daniel Handler
Lemony Snicket: (narrating) But the three siblings were not born yesterday. Violet was born more than fifteen years before this particular Wednesday, and Klaus was born approximately two years after that, and even Sunny, who had just passed out of babyhood, was not born yesterday. Neither were you, unless of course I am wrong, in which case welcome to the world, little baby, and congratulations on learning to read so early in life.

Daniel Handler
A newspaper, as I'm sure you know, is a collection of supposedly true stories written down by writers who either saw them happen or talked to people who did. These writers are called journalists, and like telephone operators, butchers, ballerinas, and people who clean up after horses, journalists can sometimes make mistakes. - Lemony Snicket

Daniel Handler
The story of the Baudelaires does not take place in a fictional land where lollipops grow on trees and singing mice do all of the chores. 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 sinister mystery that surrounds them....

Daniel Handler
Over the years they had developed a layer of sincerity over the irony over the sincerity. It was an irony sandwich, then, which tasted mostly like sincerity, like a cheap, bad sandwich.

Daniel Handler
I'm sure you have heard it said that appearance does not matter so much, and that it is what's on the inside that counts. This is, of course, utter nonsense, because if it were true then people who were good on the inside would never have to comb their hair or take a bath, and the whole world would smell even worse than it already does. -Lemony Snicket

Daniel Handler
Carmelita Spats, who oughtta be told "Gorgeous" does not start with an M.

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

Daniel Handler
If you are looking for a story about cheerful youngsters spending a jolly time at boarding school, look elsewhere. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are intelligent and resourceful children, and you might expect that they would do very well at school. Don't. For the Baudelaires, school turns out to be another miserable episode in their unlucky lives.

Daniel Handler
With the Baudelaire orphans, it was as if their grief were a very heavy object that they each took turns carrying so that they would not all be crying at once, but sometimes the object was too heavy for one of them to move without weeping, so Violet and Sunny stood next to Klaus, reminding him that this was something they could all carry together until at last they found a safe place to lay it down.

Daniel Handler
Because of the information discussed on page nine, experts now suspect that there may in fact be one survivor of the fire, but the survivor's whereabouts are unknown.

Daniel Handler
I'm frightened by your behaviour. I woke up this morning and you said good morning and i said good morning, what do you feel like doing today, and you said well i sort of have to do this thing, and i said what thing and you said go to the reading of my father's will, and I said what are you talking about and then you told me that your dad had died. THIS MORNING.

Daniel Handler
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
Richard Wright, an American novelist of the realist school, asks a famous unfathomable question in his best-known novel, Native Son. Who knows when some slight shock, he asks, disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?

Daniel Handler