Top 450 Daniel Handler Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

254. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

256. “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

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

— 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. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

267. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

270. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

272. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

274. “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

275. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

283. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

285. “They’re book addicts.”

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

293. “It looked like something the Hemlock needed, or a piece of equipment a plumber had left behind. It looked like none of your business.”

— Daniel Handler

294. “I was so grateful that Lemony Snicket wasn’t the worst movie ever made that I overlooked many things that might have otherwise upset me.”

— Daniel Handler

295. “Make sure you have your own mask on, before helping others with theirs.”

— Daniel Handler

296. “Every night I give a violin recital for six hours, and attendance is mandatory. The word ‘mandatory’ means that if you don’t show up, you have to buy me a large bag of candy and watch me eat it.”

— Daniel Handler

297. “Sometimes even in most unfortunate of lives there will occur a moment or two of good.”

— Daniel Handler

298. “The quoting of an aphorism, like the angry barking of a dog or the smell of overcooked broccoli, rarely indicates that something helpful is about to happen.”

— Daniel Handler

299. “Of course, it is boring to read about boring thing, but it is better to read something that makes you yawn with boredom than something that will make you weep uncontrollably, pound your fists against the floor, and leave tearstains all over your pillowcase, sheets, and boomerang collection.”

— Daniel Handler

300. “Tell me what it is, or prepare to eat harpoon.”

— Daniel Handler