Top 450 Daniel Handler Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “So you’re reluctant, I said to myself. Many, many people are reluctant. It’s like having feet. It’s nothing to brag about.”

— Daniel Handler

353. “This is love if it’s not with you, a terrible fiery something that makes people look away, and it feels like a punch in the throat.”

— Daniel Handler

354. “I was so angry I knew it would boomerang someplace sometime soon.”

— Daniel Handler

355. “Sometimes when someone tells a ridiculous lie, it is best to ignore it entirely.”

— Daniel Handler

356. “It is often difficult to admit that someone you love is not perfect, or to consider aspects of a person that are less than admirable.”

— Daniel Handler

357. “Take it back, Ed. Take it all back.”

— Daniel Handler

358. “She was all the world’s money, and I would spend it with her, my sharpest friend who changed the tide, my only comfort from the brutal gamble of the world and the wicked ways of men.”

— Daniel Handler

359. “It is one of life’s bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting.”

— Daniel Handler

360. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

372. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

382. “I couldn’t wait to see then again, beautiful things. Extraordinary.”

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

385. “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

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

391. “Siblings that say they never fight are most definitely hiding something.”

— Daniel Handler

392. “Love was in the air, so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner.”

— Daniel Handler

393. “If you wish to avoid an unpleasant story you had best put this book down.”

— Daniel Handler

394. “Nobody wants to fall into a safety net, because it means the structure in which they’ve been living is in a state of collapse and they have no choice but to tumble downwards. However, it beats the alternative.”

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

396. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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