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

352. “I’m always interested to see what films are made of books. I kind of don’t participate as a filmgoer in any kind of debate about what’s better, the book or the movie. So I think it’s interesting when people want to do it.”

— Daniel Handler

353. “I’m a lunatic wandering around for scraps.”

— Daniel Handler

354. “When I wrote Rick, I had the idea that I would take the plot of nearly every opera and turn it into a dark film, which is something I still may do.”

— Daniel Handler

355. “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

356. “Wherever there’s a conductor, you’re sure to find a dead composer!”

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

358. “Troublesome things tend to remain troublesome no matter how many times you do them.”

— Daniel Handler

359. “Any playlist without Prince is no friend of mine.”

— Daniel Handler

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

365. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

367. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

384. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

390. “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

391. “One has to adopt a sort of Zen calm, in which you know you wrote the best book that you could at the time.”

— Daniel Handler

392. “But there was more, as there always is when the love goes. She was haunted, naturally. Otherwise what is the point, why leave your rickety house, and why this yo-yo world giving us things and yanking them back?”

— Daniel Handler

393. “It has been said that the hardest job in the world is raising a child, but the people who says this have probably never worked at a comb factory or captured pirates on the high seas.”

— Daniel Handler

394. “Another gift, another secret, another time to lean in and kiss me.”

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

398. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

400. “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