Top 450 Daniel Handler Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Well-read people are less likely to be evil.”

— Daniel Handler

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

210. “Blinded following the Blindfolded.”

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

228. “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

229. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

231. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

233. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

235. “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

236. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

244. “Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby- awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.”

— Daniel Handler

245. “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

246. “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

247. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

249. “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

250. “There are many things in life that become different if you take a long look at them.”

— Daniel Handler