Top 450 Daniel Handler Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “She spun the car through a right turn that would have killed us all had we been minor characters.”

— Daniel Handler

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

410. “I kind of always think my work is unfilmable, and when I meet people who are interested in filming it, I’m always stunned.”

— Daniel Handler

411. “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

412. “I gasped and pointed the way. I gave you an adventure, Ed, right in front of you but you never saw it until I showed you, and that’s why we broke up.”

— Daniel Handler

413. “What you don’t read is often as important as what you do read.”

— Daniel Handler

414. “The street was a yellow streak, however many yards wide, cabs and cabs and cabs and the occasional car that wasn’t a cab so the whole thing looked like a scarcely-been-touched ear of corn.”

— Daniel Handler

415. “It is almost as if happiness is an acquired taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it.”

— Daniel Handler

416. “I think there are probably just as many adults who would miss the humor of my books, if not more, as there are children.”

— Daniel Handler

417. “It is so rare in this world to meet a trustworthy person who truly wants to help you, and finding such a person can make you feel warm and safe, even if you are in the middle of a windy valley high up in the mountains.”

— Daniel Handler

418. “Mostly, it’s flattering to meet fans. As long as it’s in a planned, professional meeting, rather than, say, someone dropping by my home, which is not as pleasant.”

— Daniel Handler

419. “I often can’t remember which scenes are and aren’t in the final product, because I saw so many different versions of the Lemony Snicket that I forget which ended up on the cutting-room floor.”

— Daniel Handler

420. “It’s not like I hadn’t seen you before. Everyone had, you’re like, I don’t know, some movie everyone sees growing up, everybody’s seen you, nobody can remember not seeing you. But just suddenly I really, really needed to see you again right that minute, that night.”

— Daniel Handler

421. “I don’t think film is the writer’s medium, and so I was interested to see what a director would do with it.”

— Daniel Handler

422. “The thing you hope will never happen to you might just happen to someone else instead, who has been spending their life dreading the thing that will happen to you.”

— Daniel Handler

423. “All over the world are particular people, and you could be happy with probably five or six of them, eight if you’re bisexual and everyone is.”

— Daniel Handler

424. “This is complicated,” you said, back on the napkin, and then looked at me. You wanted to pry me open, I could see it, drag me across our boundaries so we could feast together in secret from the rest of the world. “But,” you said, “no, not but. I love you.”

— Daniel Handler

425. “It is the presumed mission of all women, a quest for a man, and no amount of bloodshed can dissuade the myth. For a boy, people would say to her soon, in disbelief or even in admiration, and they would be all wrong.”

— Daniel Handler

426. “I’m a lunatic wandering around for scraps, I’m like every single miserable moron I’ve scorned, and pretended I didn’t recognize. I’m all of them, every last ugly thing in a bad last-minute costume. I’m not different, not at all, not different from any other speck of a thing.”

— Daniel Handler

427. “I’m very happy for you guys.” I heard my voice, so false it was all the statues could do to keep themselves from rolling their eyes.”

— Daniel Handler

428. “You have to love the whole person, if you are truly in love.”

— Daniel Handler

429. “Friends can make you feel that the world is smaller and less sneaky than it really is.”

— Daniel Handler

430. “That night it felt that somehow by flicking them off the roof, the matches would burn down everything, the sparks from the tips of the flames, torching the world and all the heartbroken people in it.”

— Daniel Handler

431. “You know how the nurses started asking me to rate my pain one to ten? I just started giving them random numbers. You can’t get to ten, I told the one with those earrings I want to yank out. You can’t get to ten because someone might slap you and that would hurt more.”

— Daniel Handler

432. “You never love a book the way you love a book when you are ten. It is an honor to be in that sacred space in some children’s brains.”

— Daniel Handler

433. “Love can smack you like a seagull, and pour all over your feet like junk mail.”

— Daniel Handler

434. “Love is really liking someone a whole lot and not wanting to screw that up.”

— Daniel Handler

435. “Is it useful to feel fear, because it prepares you for nasty events, or is it useless, because nasty events will occur whether you are frightened or not?”

— Daniel Handler

436. “I was once almost forced off the stage at a large chain bookstore that shall remain nameless, because she introduced me as Lemony Snicket, and I immediately interrupted her and said, “Oh no, Lemony Snicket isn’t here,” and then she tried to cancel the event right then and there.”

— Daniel Handler

437. “The way sadness works is one of the strangest riddles of the world.”

— Daniel Handler

438. “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

439. “It’s okay to like jerks. I mean, it’d be better to like a nice guy, but there aren’t any.”

— Daniel Handler

440. “And I hope that someday I’ll do another something stupid and I’ll have to say it a million times because that’s how long it’ll be, together with you, Min. With you.”

— Daniel Handler

441. “Everybody has a theory.”

— Daniel Handler

442. “I have produced things that I would say were sincerely cheerful. But then I am reminded by other people that no one else would see them that way.”

— Daniel Handler

443. “I can see it, Ed, I leaned deeper into you, felt you nodding along with the sounds in the room, and your warmth signaled through to me from under your shirt, lovely strong, safe and right.”

— Daniel Handler

444. “He told her then how sorry he was for last night, but not out loud.”

— Daniel Handler

445. “One narrative, about the hated people in our lands, is that eventually they get what is coming to them.”

— Daniel Handler

446. “The rinsed foam swirled into one drain that always clogged come October when the maples dropped Canadian propaganda over everything.”

— Daniel Handler

447. “Nobody knows why men do things.”

— Daniel Handler

448. “He who wants the world must first escape from it.”

— Daniel Handler

449. “Tell it to everyone you know, but pretend you’re kidding.”

— Daniel Handler

450. “There are times to stay put, and what you want will come to you, and there are times to go out into the world and find such a thing for yourself.”

— Daniel Handler