Top 573 Quotes & Sayings by Daniel Handler - Page 8

One of the remarkable things about love is that, despite very irritating people writing poems and songs about how pleasant it is, it really is quite pleasant.

Sometimes words are not enough.

Off with you" is a phrase used by people who lack the curtesy to say something more polite, such as, "if there's nothing else you require I must be going" or "I'm sorry but I'm going to have to ask you to leave, please" or even "excuse me but I believe you have mistaken my home for your own and my valuable belongings for yours and I must ask you to return the items in question to me and leave my home after untying me from this chair, as I'm unable to do it myself, if it's not too much trouble.

The way sadness works is one of the strangest riddles of the world.

I'm not a believer in predetermined fates, being rewarded for one's efforts. I'm not a believer in karma. The reason why I try to be a good person is because I think it's the right thing to do. If I commit fewer bad acts there will be fewer bad acts, maybe other people will join in committing fewer bad acts, and in time there will be fewer and fewer of them.

it is a sad truth in life that when someone has lost a loved one, friends sometimes avoid the person, just when the presence of friends is most needed.

The sea is nothing but a library of all the tears in history.

I go to bed early and rise late and feel as if I have hardly slept, probably because I have been reading almost the entire time.

Life never end when you are in it.

One of the most difficult things to think about in life is one’s regrets. Something will happen to you, and you will do the wrong thing, and for years afterward you will wish you had done something different.

The smell of cooking food is often a calming one.

There is a kind of crying I hope you have not experienced, and it is not just crying about something terrible that has happened, but a crying for all of the terrible things that have happened, not just to you but to everyone you know and to everyone you don’t know and even the people you don’t want to know, a crying that cannot be diluted by a brave deed or a kind word, but only by someone holding you as your shoulders shake and your tears run down your face.

Writing is a dying form. One reads of this every day.

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.

There are those who say that life is like a book, with chapters for each event in your life and a limited number of pages on which you can spend your time. But I prefer to think that a book is like a life, particularly a good one, which is well to worth staying up all night to finish.

Like People, animals will become frightened and likely do whatever you say if you whip them enough.

Tell me what it is, or prepare to eat harpoon.

If you have ever slept in a covered casserole dish on the highest peak of a mountain range, then you know that it is an uncomfortable place to lay one's head, even if you find a dish towel inside it that can serve as a blanket.

Shyness is a curious thing, because, like quicksand, it can strike people at any time, and also, like quicksand, it usually makes its victims look down.

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

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

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

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

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.

For Beatrice, summer without you is as cold as winter. Winter without you, is even colder.

Don’t repeat yourself. It’s not only repetitive, it’s redundant, and people have heard it before.

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.

Literature doesn’t exactly have a strong mental-health track record.

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.

In times of extreme stress, one can often find energy hidden in even the most exhausted areas of the body.

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

You can invent things like automatic popcorn poppers. You can invent things like steam-powered window washers. But you can’t invent more time.

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.

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

Your initial opinion on just about anything may change over time.

What happens in a certain place can stain your feelings for that location, just as ink can stain a white sheet. You can wash it, and wash it, and still never forget what has transpired - a word which here means 'happened, and made everybody sad'.

Grinning is something you do when you are entertained in some way, such as reading a good book or watching someone you don't care for spill orange soda all over themselves.

Simply put, dramatic irony is when a person makes a harmless remark, and someone else who hears it knows something that makes the remark have a different, and usually unpleasant, meaning. For instance, if you were in a restaurant and said out loud, "I can't wait to eat the veal marsala I ordered," and there were people around who knew that the veal marsala was poisoned and that you would die as soon as you took a bite, your situation would be one of dramatic irony.

A mystery is solved with a story.

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

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

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

Dumping you times infinity. Still not enough.

There's an easy method for finding someone when you hear them scream. First get a clean sheet of paper and a sharp pencil. Then sketch out nine rows of fourteen squares each. Then throw the piece of paper away and find whoever is screaming so you can help them. It is no time to fiddle with paper.

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.

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

They say in every library there is a single book that can answer the question that burns like a fire in the mind.

You must be all a-tingle with excitement.' 'I guess so,' I said, but I did not feel a-tingle. I did not feel a-anything.

It looked like something the Hemlock needed, or a piece of equipment a plumber had left behind. It looked like none of your business.

But the law is an odd thing. For instance, one country in Europe has a law that requires all its bakers to sell bread at the exact same price. A certain island has a law that forbids anyone from removing its fruit. And a town not too far from where you live has a law that bars me from coming within five miles of its borders.

We all know of course, that we should never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever fiddle around in any way with electrical equipment. NEVER.

The right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing” is a phrase that refers to times when people ought to know, but don’t know, about something that is happening very close to them. For instance, you ought to know about the man who watches you when you sleep.

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.

Accidents happen all the time.

Every problem has a solution. Sometimes it just takes a long time to find the solution - even if it's right in front of your nose.

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

The thing with your heart's desire is that your heart doesn't even know what it desires until it turns up. Like a tie at a tag sale, some perfect thing in a crate of nothing, you were just there, uninvited, and now suddenly the party was over and you were all I wanted. I hadn't even been looking, not for you, and now you were my heart's desire.

If you are interested in happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not very many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters.

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

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