Top 450 Daniel Handler Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “It is one of life’s bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting.”

— Daniel Handler

352. “There is no way of knowing for sure whether or not you can trust someone, for the simple reason that circumstances change all of the time.”

— Daniel Handler

353. “Once more, this is love: it rings and you open up unless it looks like an ax murderer.”

— Daniel Handler

354. “There are many difficult things in this world to hide, but a secret is not one of them.”

— Daniel Handler

355. “Instead of the word ‘love’ there was an enormous heart, a symbol sometimes used by people who have trouble figuring out the difference between words and shapes.”

— Daniel Handler

356. “All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk.”

— Daniel Handler

357. “If you have ever lost a loved one, then you know exactly how it feels. And if you have not, then you cannot possibly imagine it.”

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

359. “My chauffer once told me that I would feel better in the morning, but when I woke up the two of us were still on a tiny island surrounded by man-eating crocodiles, and, as I’m sure you can understand, I didn’t feel any better about it.”

— Daniel Handler

360. “You should never stick something that you are allergic to into your mouth, especially if that thing is cats.”

— Daniel Handler

361. “The file clanked against me, my stupid idea nobody would have gotten had I ever done it. You even wouldn’t have gotten it, Ed, I thought, watching her go. It’s why we broke up, so here it is. Ed, how could you?”

— Daniel Handler

362. “One of the remarkable things about love is that, despite very irritating people writing poems and songs about how pleasant it is, it really is quite pleasant.”

— Daniel Handler

363. “There are some people who believe that home is where one hangs one’s hat, but these people tend to live in closets and on little pegs.”

— Daniel Handler

364. “This is love, to sit with someone you’ve known forever in a place you’ve been meaning to go, and watching as their life happens to them until you stand up and it’s time to go. You don’t care about yours. Why should it change, the love you feel, no matter how death goes?”

— Daniel Handler

365. “I like to think that I get better and better as a writer, but it seems pretty easy to me to slip on disguises of various people.”

— Daniel Handler

366. “Just because something is traditional is no reason to do it, of course.”

— Daniel Handler

367. “Treat reluctance like seasickness,” Errol said, picking something off his sleeve. “If you feel it, focus on the horizon.”

— Daniel Handler

368. “Phil Needle stood in the parking lot, suddenly grasping that this was so, that nothing is lost in a world utterly mapped, that nothing is rogue with everything cross-pollinated, as the shouts on the beach lured him across the street to the sand.”

— Daniel Handler

369. “I’m not a cuckoo, either. I’m a fool is what.”

— Daniel Handler

370. “We steal the happiness of others in order to be happy ourselves, and when it is stolen from us we voyage desperately to steal it back.”

— Daniel Handler

371. “Every time you said it, you really said it. It wasn’t like a sequel where Hollywood just lines up the same actors and hopes it works again. It was like a remake with a new director and crew trying something else and starting from scratch.”

— Daniel Handler

372. “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

373. “Stretched out in front of me was my time as an adult, and then a skeleton, and then nothing except perhaps a few books on a few shelves.”

— Daniel Handler

374. “And I almost said I love you. Instead I said nothing and you said nothing.”

— Daniel Handler

375. “The more I protest that I’m not Lemony Snicket, and that I’m Daniel Handler instead, the more it becomes clear to the audience that I am in fact Lemony Snicket, that I am in fact standing in front of them.”

— Daniel Handler

376. “I liked, I admit, that we didn’t pretend there hadn’t been other girls. There was always a girl on you in the halls at school, like they came free with a backpack.”

— Daniel Handler

377. “Criminals should be punished, not fed pastries.”

— Daniel Handler

378. “Those unable to catalog the past are doomed to repeat it.”

— Daniel Handler

379. “The sea is nothing but a library of all the tears in history.”

— Daniel Handler

380. “It is always terrible to be told to go play with people one doesn’t know...”

— Daniel Handler

381. “There are stories about people who have loved someone forever after laying eyes on them for a few minutes and then nevermore, but these stories have not happened to anyone we know. No, when you love someone you spend hours and hours with them, and even the mightiest forces in the netherworld could not say whether the hours you spend increase your love or if you simply spend more hours with someone as your love increases.”

— Daniel Handler

382. “It’s funny, particularly when you’re a writer and you’re doing well, you have that sense of like, “Oh! My view of the world is the one that’s going to be published.””

— Daniel Handler

383. “Sometime during your life – in fact, very soon – you may find yourself reading a book, and you may notice that a book’s first sentence can often tell you what sort of story your book contains.”

— Daniel Handler

384. “The flames rose bright on everyone’s screens, flickering lipstick red and traffic-cone orange and Lord knows what else, depending on how your television’s colour was.”

— Daniel Handler

385. “The trouble with talking about irony is, it’s such a slippery thing that the second you start talking about it, you’re a better example of it than you are an analyst.”

— Daniel Handler

386. “They looked at each other like a pair of parentheses.”

— Daniel Handler

387. “This toast feels raw. Is it safe to eat raw toast?”

— Daniel Handler

388. “She licked her lips and then wiped them on her hand, her dark lipstick staining her wrist like a suicide.”

— Daniel Handler

389. “After all, I was only eighteen then. I’m almost twenty now. I learned lots about narrative structure in my Honors English classes so I know what I’m doing.”

— Daniel Handler

390. “She spun the car through a right turn that would have killed us all had we been minor characters.”

— Daniel Handler

391. “Wishing, like sipping a glass of punch, or pulling aside a bearskin rug in order to access a hidden trapdoor in the floor, is merely a quiet way to spend one’s time before the candles are extinguished on one’s birthday cake.”

— Daniel Handler

392. “If you open this you’ll see it’s empty, and you’ll wonder for a sec if it was empty when you gave it yo me – I can see it – another empty gesture you slipped into my hand like a bad bribe.”

— Daniel Handler

393. “Money is like a child – rarely unaccompanied. When it disappears, look to those who were supposed to be keeping an eye on it while you were at the grocery store. You might also look for someone who has a lot of extra children sitting around, with long, suspicious explanations for how they got there.”

— Daniel Handler

394. “Grinning is something you do when you are entertained in some way, such as reading a good book or watching someone you don’t care for spill orange soda all over themselves.”

— Daniel Handler

395. “All his life, Klaus had believed that if you read enough books, you could solve any problem, but now he wasn’t so sure.”

— Daniel Handler

396. “Most schools have a loud system of loud bells, which startle the students and teachers at regular intervals and remind them that time is passing even more slowly than it seems.”

— Daniel Handler

397. “Relax,” she said. “You will be wise. You’re young. You can’t have everything right away.” When something simple and true takes you by surprise, it hits you in the stomach.”

— Daniel Handler

398. “I wrote Rick before I was published, and I had no vision of it, really. It was just a story that occurred to me, and that put its little claws in my brain, and I wrote it, and I showed it to a couple people, and they all said, “This is ghastly.””

— Daniel Handler

399. “We are a nation of children letting horrible things happen, and flunking Calc.”

— Daniel Handler

400. “I don’t have to answer to you,” Adam said, instantly and harshly. He brushed his pants off like he’d just buried his mother.”

— Daniel Handler