Top 450 Daniel Handler Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Blank paper has always inspired me.”

— Daniel Handler

102. “The thing with your heart’s desire is that your heart doesn’t even know what it desires until it turns up.”

— Daniel Handler

103. “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

104. “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

105. “The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth both have first-person voices, and I ended up investigating those voices and investing so much in them that I think many people took them more seriously than they ought to have.”

— Daniel Handler

106. “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.”

— Daniel Handler

107. “It is difficult, when faced with a situation you cannot control, to admit you can do nothing.”

— Daniel Handler

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “With a library it is easier to hope for serendipity than to look for a precise answer.”

— Daniel Handler

112. “Everything else has vanished, so you take them now. Maybe if you’re the one keeping them, I’ll be the one feeling better.”

— Daniel Handler

113. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

115. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

117. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

119. “Friends can make you feel that the world is smaller and less sneaky than it really is, because you know people who have similar experiences.”

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

121. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

123. “A bolt from the blue.”

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “Someone feeling wronged is like someone feeling thirsty. Don’t tell them they aren’t. Sit with them and have a drink.”

— Daniel Handler

129. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

131. “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

132. “A new experience can be extremely pleasurable, or extremely irritating, or somewhere in between, and you never know until you try it out.”

— Daniel Handler

133. “Hup hup ha ha hammy hee hee!”

— Daniel Handler

134. “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

135. “Tears are curious things, for like earthquakes or puppet shows, they can occur at any time, without any warning and without any good reason.”

— Daniel Handler

136. “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

137. “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

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. “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

140. “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

141. “Nobody wants to hear that you will try your best. It is the wrong thing to say. It is like saying ‘I probably won’t hit you with a shovel.’ Suddenly everyone is afraid you will do the opposite.”

— Daniel Handler

142. “The expression ‘Those who can’t do, teach’ is a curious one, because if you look at the world, you’ll see that teachers aren’t particularly worse at doing things than anyone else, so perhaps the expression might be better worded as ’nobody can do anything.”

— Daniel Handler

143. “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

144. “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

145. “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

146. “You meet people who are in pain in life and love and you forgive them for behaving the way they do.”

— Daniel Handler

147. “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

148. “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

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. “Te quise y ahora te devuelvo tus cosas, las saco de mi vida como a ti...”

— Daniel Handler