Top 450 Daniel Handler Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “Count Olaf sounds like an awful person. I hope he is torn apart by wild animals someday. Wouldn’t that be satisfying?”

— Daniel Handler

202. “The key to good eavesdropping is not getting caught.”

— Daniel Handler

203. “It looked exhausting and pointless, two things that should be avoided at all costs.”

— Daniel Handler

204. “We need things, and the opposite of them, and we are so rarely completely comfortable.”

— Daniel Handler

205. “Blinded following the Blindfolded.”

— Daniel Handler

206. “Why not rise from the grave and terrorize a little instead of staying buried and dead in the cemetery?”

— Daniel Handler

207. “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.”

— Daniel Handler

208. “I do think of emotions as being on a circular path, so you can feel terrible and terrible and terrible, and then all of a sudden it becomes quite funny.”

— Daniel Handler

209. “Everybody will die, but very few people want to be reminded of that fact.”

— Daniel Handler

210. “It is always tedious when someone tells you that if you don’t stop crying, they will give you something to cry about, because if you are crying then you already have something to cry about, and so there is no reason for them to give you anything additional to cry about, thank you very much.”

— Daniel Handler

211. “Well-read people are less likely to be evil.”

— Daniel Handler

212. “There is a pair of snakes who have learned to drive a car so recklessly that they would run you over in the street and never stop to apologize.”

— Daniel Handler

213. “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.”

— Daniel Handler

214. “In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.”

— Daniel Handler

215. “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 mystery that surrounds them.”

— Daniel Handler

216. “What happens in a certain place can stain your feelings for that location, just as ink can stain a white sheet.”

— Daniel Handler

217. “There are few sights sadder than a ruined book.”

— Daniel Handler

218. “Who can I complain to, if I don’t like the shape of the globe?”

— Daniel Handler

219. “It seemed to me that every adult did something terrible sooner or later. And every child, I thought, sooner or later becomes an adult.”

— Daniel Handler

220. “Having a personal philosophy is like having a pet marmoset, because it may be very attractive when you acquire it, but there may be situations when it will not come in handy at all.”

— Daniel Handler

221. “I know all these facts about you and there is no longer any use for them.”

— Daniel Handler

222. “This is how it is in life and love. In life and love we are with people for a while, and then we join other people, people we have not met, and we walk with them, and we leave behind all the things we used to be. Sometimes we leave people behind too... This happens everyday. Everyday this happens and scarcely anybody cares.”

— Daniel Handler

223. “I think we’ll always miss our parents. But I think we can miss them without being miserable all the time. After all, they wouldn’t want us to be miserable.”

— Daniel Handler

224. “Various parts of my body told me that in the future they would appreciate it if I slept lying down on a bed instead of sitting at the counter of Black Cat Coffee. I quietly reassured them that this was an unusual situation, and had the machinery make me some bread as a breakfast.”

— Daniel Handler

225. “Waiting is one of life’s hardships.”

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

227. “I don’t know why wicked places generally look wicked. You’d think they’d look nice, to fool people, but they hardly ever do.”

— Daniel Handler

228. “Normally it is not polite to go into somebody’s room without knocking, but you can make an exception if the person is dead, or pretending to be dead.”

— Daniel Handler

229. “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.”

— Daniel Handler

230. “When you say, “History is written by the winners,” you like to think about someone who isn’t you. You want to think, “Oh, that’s the juggernaut I’m standing against.” But you’re probably part of it.”

— Daniel Handler

231. “Can’t we sleep ten minutes more? I was having a lovely dream about sneezing without covering my mouth, and giving everybody germs.”

— Daniel Handler

232. “But the world did not match the picture in my head, and instead I was with a strange, uncombed person, overlooking a sea without water and a forest without trees.”

— Daniel Handler

233. “He looked like the sort of person who would tell you that he did not have an umbrella to lend you when he actually had several and simply wanted to see you get soaked.”

— Daniel Handler

234. “It is one of the peculiar truths of life that people often say things that they know full well are ridiculous.”

— Daniel Handler

235. “We laughed the rest of the way, because the point of this story is, it is not the cookies. It is the love.”

— Daniel Handler

236. “A passport, as I’m sure you know, is a document that one shows to government officials whenever one reaches a border between two countries, so that the official can learn who you are, where you were born, and how you look when photographed unflatteringly.”

— Daniel Handler

237. “There are secrets everywhere. I think everyone’s parents have secrets. You just have to know where to look for them.”

— Daniel Handler

238. “There are some who go through life with a shadow hanging over them, particularly if they live in a building which has long wide awnings.”

— Daniel Handler

239. “They were almond cookies, although they could have been made of spinach and shoes for all I cared. I ate eleven of them, right in a row. It is rude to take the last cookie.”

— Daniel Handler

240. “The bus driver gave me a why-the-hell-aren’t-you-at-school look and I gave him a shut-up-you’re-a-bus-driver-so-bus-drive look right back.”

— Daniel Handler

241. “I write storys to entertain not to be the best.”

— Daniel Handler

242. “I am heartbroken, but I have been heartbroken before, and this might be the best for which I can hope.”

— Daniel Handler

243. “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.”

— Daniel Handler

244. “If you have ever had a miserable experience, then you have probably had it said to you that you would feel better in the morning. This, of course, is utter nonsense, because a miserable experience remains a miserable experience even on the loveliest of morning.”

— Daniel Handler

245. “You might be afraid of the dark, but the dark is not afraid of you. That’s why the dark is always close by.”

— Daniel Handler

246. “I love meeting people who have absolutely no sense of irony. It’s really fascinating to imagine what it would be like to go through life without understanding even the most basic of ironies.”

— Daniel Handler

247. “The smell of cooking food is often a calming one.”

— Daniel Handler

248. “It is very easy to say that the important thing is to try your best, but if you are in real trouble the most important thing is not trying your best, but getting to safety.”

— Daniel Handler

249. “I’m alone. There’s a poem in that, but I don’t want to write it. I don’t want to be someone who spends Saturday night alone at home, writing poems about being alone.”

— Daniel Handler

250. “Why haven’t we fixed sick yet? You scientists there – put down those starfish and HELP us. I hereby demand that all the people who are good at math make the world free of illness. The rest of us will write you epic poems and staple them together into a booklet.”

— Daniel Handler