Top 450 Daniel Handler Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “What you don’t read is often as important as what you do read.”

— Daniel Handler

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

407. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

409. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

412. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

436. “Everybody has a theory.”

— Daniel Handler

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

443. “Nobody knows why men do things.”

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

445. “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

446. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

448. “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

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

— Daniel Handler

450. “Making you happy isn’t making me happy.”

— Daniel Handler