Best 463 quotes of Daniel Handler on MyQuotes

Dead women tell no tales. Sad men write them down.

Death is something you cannot escape, such as death, or a cheesecake that has curdled, both of which always turn up sooner later.

Desperate times call for desperate measures" is an aphorism which here means "sometimes you need to change your facial expression in order to create a workable disguise." The quoting of an aphorism, such as "It takes a village to raise a child," "No news is good news," and "Love conquers all," rarely indicates that something helpful is about to happen, which is why we provide our volunteers with a disguise kit in addition to helpful phrases of advice.

Desperation is like a spilled drink; even if it's delicious, no one will get near it. Cultivate an aura of glamorous unapproachability.

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

Do the scary thing first, and get scared later.

Dumping you times infinity. Still not enough.

E!" Klaus cried. "E as in Exit!" The Baudelaires ran down E as in Exit, but when they reached the last cabinet, the row was becoming F as in Falling File Cabinets, G as in Go the Other Way! and H as in How in the World Are We Going to Escape?

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.

Every new promise was like something heavy I had to carry, with no place to put anything down.

Every night I give a violin recital for six hours, and attendance is mandatory. The word 'mandatory' means that if you don't show up, you have to buy me a large bag of candy and watch me eat it.

Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night's sleep again and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up, so that they can feel this way, too.

Everyone on earth would never starve and forever find love and happiness, since we won, but if we’d lost, they would have gouged out our eyes and thrown us naked onto hot coals and poisonous snakes for all the cheering and hugging at the end, strangers hugging like the end of The Omega Virus when Steve Sturmine finds the antidote.

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.

Everything. A letter may be coded, and a word may be coded. A theatrical performance may be coded, and a sonnet may be coded, and there are times when it seems the entire world is in code. Some believe that the world can be decoded by performing research in a library. Others believe that the world can be decoded by reading a newspaper. In my case, the only thing that made sense of the world was you, and without you the world will seem as garbled and tragic as a malfunctioning typewrit9.

Every time you enter a library you might say to yourself, "The world is quiet here," as a sort of pledge proclaiming reading to be the greater good.

Fetching objects for people who are too lazy to fetch them for themselves is never a pleasant task, particularly when the people are insulting you.

Figuratively, they escaped from Cout Olaf and their miserable existence. They did not literally escape, because they were still in his house and vulnerable to Olaf's evil in loco parentis ways.

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

For Beatrice- When we were together I felt breathless. Now you are.

For Beatrice- My love for you shall live forever. You, however, did not.

For Beatrice, our love broke my heart, and stopped yours.

For every teenager I know, having a phone is a mixed blessing, because your parents can press a button and figure out where you are.

For some stories, it's easy. The moral of 'The Three Bears,' for instance, is "Never break into someone else's house.' The moral of 'Snow White' is 'Never eat apples.' The moral of World War I is 'Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand.

Frustration is an interesting emotional state, because it tends to bring out the worst in whoever is frustrated.

Get out of my way, you cakesniffers!” said a rude, violent, and filthy little girl, shoving the Baudelaire orphans aside as she dashed by.

Goodness! Golly! Good God! Blessed Allah! Zeus and Hera! Mary and Joseph! Nathaniel Hawthorne! Don't touch her! Grab her! Move closer! Run away! Don't move! Kill the snake! Leave it alone! Give it some food! Don't let it bite her! Lure the snake away! Here, snakey! Here, snakey snakey!

Grammar is the greatest joy in life, don't you find?

Grief, a type of sadness that most often occurs when you have lost someone you love, is a sneaky thing, because it can disappear for a long time, and then pop back up when you least expect it.

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.

Hal is on his way." The nurse announced reentering the room.

Having an aura of menace is like having a pet weasel, because you rarely meet someone who has one, and when you do, it makes you want to hide under the coffee table.

Hello, freaky peoples!

'Help me,' Allison says, but she is soft-spoken, and everyone she loves is so far away.

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.

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.

How did you do that?” Mr. Poe asked. “Nice girls shouldn’t know how to do such things.” “My sister is a nice girl,” Klaus said, “and she knows how to do all sorts of things.

How do you do?" said Violet. "How do you do?" said Klaus. "Odo yow!" said Sunny.

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.

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.

I always think it's silly when people talk about works of culture taking risks. Because there's not any risk involved.

I am certain that over the course of your own life, you have noticed that people's rooms reflect their personalities. In my room, for instance, I have gathered a collection of objects that are important to me, including a dusty accordion on which I can play a few sad songs, a large bundle of notes on the activities of the Baudelaire orphans, and a blurry photograph, taken a very long time ago, of a woman whose name is Beatrice. These are items that are very precious and dear to me.

I am so tired, I can hardly type these worfs.

I can see it, Ed, I leaned deeper into you, felt you nodding along with the sounds in the room, and your warmth signaled through to me from under your shirt, lovely strong, safe and right.

I can't imagine why you would want to take your child to see what the career of a writer is like, because it mostly consists of sitting in a room typing, or going to the library and looking something up. Those are not exciting things to watch.

I can't think of a story that doesn't have something terrible in it. Otherwise, it's dull. So when I embarked into the world of picture books, my first thought was to do something about the dark.

I decided that it might be interesting to have terrible things happen to orphans over and over again.

I'd finished the first two [books] and they were going to to be published, and [editor] said, "We need you to write a summary that will drive people to these books." And it took forever. I couldn't think of a thing to say. I looked at the back of other children's books that were full of giddy praise and corny rhetorical questions, you know, "Will she have a better time at summer camp than she thinks?" "How will she escape from the troll's dungeon?" All these terrible, terrible summaries of books, and I just couldn't.

I didn't realize this was a sad occasion.

I'd made pretty clear to the people at Paramount and Dreamworks that, if they wanted Lemony Snicket to comment, he would be completely horrified by the entire film. And as long as they understood that, it was okay. I'm not much of a fan of DVD commentaries myself, so this was my way of getting revenge, in a sense, for all the puffed-up directors and stars who talk endlessly about the self-aggrandizing minutiae of making a movie.