Top 450 Daniel Handler Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “You meet people who are in pain in life and love and you forgive them for behaving the way they do.”

— Daniel Handler

102. “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

103. “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

104. “There are two types of panicking: standing still and not saying a word, and leaping all over the place babbling anything that comes into your head.”

— Daniel Handler

105. “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.”

— Daniel Handler

106. “Like a church bell, a coffin, and a vat of melted chocolate, a supply closet is rarely a comfortable place to hide.”

— Daniel Handler

107. “I didn’t realize this was a sad occasion.”

— Daniel Handler

108. “The trick to following someone without getting caught is to follow somebody who doesn’t think they’re being followed.”

— Daniel Handler

109. “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

110. “It is useless for me to describe to you how terrible Violet, Klaus, and even Sunny felt in the time that followed. If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels, and if you haven’t, you cannot possibly imagine it.”

— Daniel Handler

111. “It is very difficult to make one’s way in this world without being wicked at one time or another, when the world’s way is so wicked to being with.”

— Daniel Handler

112. “A successful villain should have all these things at his or her villainous fingertips, or else give up villainy altogether and try to lead a life of decency, integrity, and kindness, which is much more challenging and noble, if not always quite as exciting.”

— Daniel Handler

113. “Certain people have said that the world is like a calm pond, and that anytime a person does even the smallest thing, it is as if a stone has dropped into the pond, spreading circles of ripples further and further out, until the entire world has been changed by one tiny action.”

— Daniel Handler

114. “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.”

— Daniel Handler

115. “Besides getting several paper cuts in the same day or receiving the news that someone in your family has betrayed you to your enemies, one of the most unpleasant experiences in life is a job interview.”

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

117. “I wore it, this careless thing you don’t even remember giving to me from your bag. It wasn’t a gift, this thing I’m returning. It was barely a gesture, almost forgotten already, this thing I wore like it was dear to me. And it was. No wonder we broke up.”

— Daniel Handler

118. “You can’t believe everything you read.”

— Daniel Handler

119. “Blank paper has always inspired me.”

— Daniel Handler

120. “The moral of Snow White is never eat apples.”

— Daniel Handler

121. “Today was a very cold and bitter day, as cold and bitter as a cup of hot chocolate, if the cup of hot chocolate had vinegar added to it and were placed in a refrigerator for several hours.”

— Daniel Handler

122. “Klaus sighed, and opened a book, and as at so many other times when the middle Baudelaire child did not want to think about his circumstances, he began to read.”

— Daniel Handler

123. “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.”

— Daniel Handler

124. “I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms.”

— Daniel Handler

125. “Never look a gift lion in the mouth.”

— Daniel Handler

126. “The last safe place is safe no more.”

— Daniel Handler

127. “I started making plans, thinking we would get that far.”

— Daniel Handler

128. “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

129. “For Beatrice – My love for you shall live forever. You, however, did not.”

— Daniel Handler

130. “The difference between a house and a home is like the difference between a man and a woman – it might be embarrassing to explain, but it would be very unusual to get them confused.”

— Daniel Handler

131. “Adverbs is a book about love, and I thought that was pretty cheerful, but people who are reading it now are telling me that it’s actually quite dark.”

— Daniel Handler

Featured in: Reading Quotes

132. “This is an absurd moral, for you and I both know that sometimes not only is it good to lie, it is necessary to lie.”

— Daniel Handler

133. “To stop staring at you, I kept fiddling with the sugar until you stopped my hand with yours.”

— Daniel Handler

134. “A bolt from the blue.”

— Daniel Handler

135. “If he’s not gay and he hung out with you the whole time, he wanted to be. It’s boyfriend or want to be boyfriend or I guess gay. Those are the choices.”

— Daniel Handler

136. “Hup hup ha ha hammy hee hee!”

— Daniel Handler

137. “Dumping you times infinity. Still not enough.”

— Daniel Handler

138. “This feeling is not unlike the sinking in one’s stomach when one is in an elevator that suddenly goes down, or when you are snug in your bed and your closet door suddenly creaks open to reveal the person who has been hiding there.”

— Daniel Handler

139. “Even the best plans can change if there’s an accident.”

— Daniel Handler

140. “Miracles are like meatballs, because nobody can exactly agree on what they are made of, where they come from, or how often they should appear.”

— Daniel Handler

141. “It is not very polite to interrupt a person, of course, but sometimes if the person is very unpleasant you can hardly stop yourself.”

— Daniel Handler

142. “An Overall Feeling of Doom that One Cannot Ever Escape no Matter What One Does.”

— Daniel Handler

143. “All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk.”

— Daniel Handler

144. “Either you have the feeling or you don’t. Hawk Davies.”

— Daniel Handler

145. “One wanders through life as if wandering through a field in the dark of night, wearing a blindfold and very heavy shoes, with a poisonous toad waiting patiently beneath a clump of weeds, knowing full well that eventually you will step on him.”

— Daniel Handler

146. “The sad truth is the truth is sad.”

— Daniel Handler

147. “Taking one’s chances is like taking a bath, because sometimes you end up feeling comfortable and warm, and sometimes there is something terrible lurking around that you cannot see until it is too late and you can do nothing else but scream and cling to a plastic duck.”

— Daniel Handler

148. “To stutter through it with you or even stop stuttering and say nothing, was so lucky and soft, better talk than mile-a-minute with anyone. After a few minutes we’d stop rattling, we’d adjust, we’d settle in, and the conversation would speed into the night.”

— Daniel Handler

149. “My general writing preface is to write an outline and then ignore about half of it, both on a micro level with the individual book, and on a macro level with the series as a whole, and that’s pretty much what’s happened.”

— Daniel Handler

150. “Whenever you are examining someone else’s belongings, you are bound to learn many interesting things about the person of which you were not previously aware.”

— Daniel Handler