Top 450 Daniel Handler Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Young writers should read books past bedtime and write things down in notebooks when they are supposed to be doing something else.”

— Daniel Handler

202. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

205. “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

206. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

209. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

212. “Blinded following the Blindfolded.”

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

214. “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

215. “It was a secret time and place, you next to me, untraceable and out of this world.”

— Daniel Handler

216. “Phillip Murray and Wanda Saxton meet in the last scene under the rainy awning, their wrong wife and fiance finally story-lined away, and walk out together into the downpour – we know from the first scene, Christmas eve, that both of them like walking in the rain but don’t have anybody who will do it with them – and it’s the miracle of the ending.”

— Daniel Handler

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “I guess it’s funny how life turns out?” she tried. “Not last I checked,” Errol said with a snort.”

— Daniel Handler

221. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

223. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

225. “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

226. “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.”

— Daniel Handler

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Daniel Handler

233. “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

234. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

236. “Take back the smile and the night, take it all back, I wish I could.”

— Daniel Handler

237. “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

238. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

243. “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

244. “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

245. “I never told you that, even after telling you I love you, all those times all that day, I never told you how beautiful it was then, like everyone was telling us not to be.”

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

248. “The last time I saw you, I was trying to throw thumbtacks into your cradle!”

— Daniel Handler

249. “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

250. “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