Top 450 Daniel Handler Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

253. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

256. “So she loved him. She just did immediately and again often and clearly naturally and soundly and obviously and many others.”

— Daniel Handler

257. “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

258. “There are some secrets you want to keep to yourself, even if they don’t matter. They might only matter if you keep them secret.”

— Daniel Handler

259. “I suppose I’ll have to add the force of gravity to my list of enemies.”

— Daniel Handler

260. “You have to love the whole person, if you are truly in love. If you are going to take a lifelong journey with somebody, you can’t mind if the other person believes they are leaving for that journey an hour earlier than you, as long as truly, in the real world, you are both leaving at exactly the same time.”

— Daniel Handler

261. “But there are times in this harum-scarum world when figuring out the right thing to do is quite simple, but doing the right thing is simply impossible...”

— Daniel Handler

262. “I think if I were walking someplace and I saw a corpse my brain would tell me it was a million things before I believed it was a corpse.”

— Daniel Handler

263. “I was too jitterbuggy happy to sleep, and the whole day kept playing in my brain’s little screening room.”

— Daniel Handler

264. “If I were to say, “Yes, I am a fascinating, erudite person,” what would that say about me? I don’t know.”

— Daniel Handler

265. “I opened my mouth and kissed you then, the first time all night, attacked you and surrendered completely, and let’s get out of here. I’m ready, I’m finished, let’s not break up, no, no. Take me home, my boyfriend, my love.”

— Daniel Handler

266. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

268. “How can someone so wonderful do something so terrible?”

— Daniel Handler

269. “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

270. “I hadn’t even been looking, not for you, and now you were my heart’s desire.”

— Daniel Handler

271. “The Long Goodbye’ is one book I like to read over and over again, and it was an enormous inspiration for ‘All The Wrong Questions’.”

— Daniel Handler

272. “The children of this world and the adults of this world are in entirely separate boats and only drift near each other when we need a ride from someone or when someone needs us to wash our hands.”

— Daniel Handler

273. “There is nothing particularly wrong with salmon, of course, but like caramel candy, strawberry yogurt, or liquid carpet cleaner, if you eat too much of it you are not going to enjoy your meal.”

— Daniel Handler

274. “I never want to be away from you again, except at work, in the restroom or when one of us is at a movie the other does not want to see.”

— Daniel Handler

275. “Right now I have the suspicion that the ace of diamonds is trapped forever, face down, beneath the king of diamonds, which is sneering at me like Juror Number Five, and my whole life feels like a similar misshuffle.”

— Daniel Handler

276. “But more often the woman was alone and would walk around naked for some reason, neither beautiful enough nor ugly enough to make sense.”

— Daniel Handler

277. “Arguing with somebody is never pleasant, but sometimes it is useful and necessary to do so.”

— Daniel Handler

278. “Here we are at the bottom, almost empty. It’s like confetti, these dried remnants you find in the street for a party no one invited you to. But they used to be, I can admit, part of something beautiful.”

— Daniel Handler

279. “13. 99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree.”

— Daniel Handler

280. “Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily.”

— Daniel Handler

281. “You would run much slower if you were dragging something behind you, like a knapsack or a sheriff.”

— Daniel Handler

282. “Just because something is typed-whether it is typed on a business card or typed in a newspaper or book-this does not mean that it is true.”

— Daniel Handler

283. “I found powerful the idea that everything we have is, in effect, stolen from everybody else.”

— Daniel Handler

284. “There’s an easy method for finding someone when you hear them scream. First get a clean sheet of paper and a sharp pencil. Then sketch out nine rows of fourteen squares each. Then throw the piece of paper away and find whoever is screaming so you can help them. It is no time to fiddle with paper.”

— Daniel Handler

285. “Occasionally there are parents who say, “I brought my child so he or she could learn what the career of a writer is like, and you did this long theatrical performance instead, and I’m very disappointed.””

— Daniel Handler

286. “There was still plenty of water in the basement, and I felt it soaking me from the knees on down. If someone wanted to torture me until I told them a critical piece of information, all they would have to do is get my socks wet. It feels terrible.”

— Daniel Handler

287. “Just about everybody has written a first novel that they throw away before writing their actual first novel.”

— Daniel Handler

288. “Chestnuts in stuffing tastes like someone chewed up a tree branch and then French-kissed it into your mouth.”

— Daniel Handler

289. “They’re book addicts.”

— Daniel Handler

290. “Having an aura of menace is like having a pet weasel, because you rarely meet someone who has one, and when you do, it makes you want to hide under the coffee table.”

— Daniel Handler

291. “A girl’s bag is an abandoned warehouse. Stupid people in horror movies are the only ones to venture in.”

— Daniel Handler

292. “Goodness! Golly! Good God! Blessed Allah! Zeus and Hera! Mary and Joseph! Nathaniel Hawthorne! Don’t touch her! Grab her! Move closer! Run away! Don’t move! Kill the snake! Leave it alone! Give it some food! Don’t let it bite her! Lure the snake away! Here, snakey! Here, snakey snakey!”

— Daniel Handler

293. “For obvious reasons, I never told you about my notebook, with a cover as green as mansions long ago, which I use as a commonplace book, a phrase which here means ’place where I have collected passages from some of the most important books I have read.”

— Daniel Handler

294. “Sometimes, even the best of plans will occur to you when it is too late.”

— Daniel Handler

295. “It is often said that reading is a gift, but to my mind that is an insufficient description, for the size of the gift of reading is so vast that it is difficult to see what is outside its wrapping.”

— Daniel Handler

Featured in: Reading Quotes

296. “I go to bed early and rise late and feel as if I have hardly slept, probably because I have been reading almost the entire time.”

— Daniel Handler

Featured in: Reading Quotes

297. “A girl meets a boy, Ed, and everything changes, or so she says.”

— Daniel Handler

298. “Tartamudear contigo o incluso dejar de tartamudear y no decir nada era tan hermoso y dulce, mejor que hablar a mil por hora con cualquiera.”

— Daniel Handler

299. “One of the world’s most popular entertainments is a deck of cards, which contains thirteen each of four suits, highlighted by kings, queens and jacks, who are possibly the queen’s younger, more attractive boyfriends.”

— Daniel Handler

300. “To hear the phrase “our only hope” always makes one anxious, because it means that if the only hope doesn’t work, there is nothing left.”

— Daniel Handler