Top 500 Lemony Snicket Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Deciding on a safe answer to a question is like deciding on a safe ingredient in a sandwich, because if you make the wrong decisions you may find that something horrible is coming out of your mouth.”

— Lemony Snicket

152. “Normally it is not polite to go into somebody’s room without knocking, but you can make an exception if the person is dead, or pretending to be dead.”

— Lemony Snicket

153. “Whether you have been sent to see the principle of your school for throwing wet paper towels at the ceiling to see if they stick or taken to the dentist to plead with him to hollow out one of your teeth so you can smuggle a single page of your latest book past the guards at the airport, it is never a pleasant feeling to stand outside the door of an office...”

— Lemony Snicket

154. “Hungry people should be fed. It takes some people a long time to figure this out.”

— Lemony Snicket

155. “For Beatrice, summer without you is as cold as winter. Winter without you, is even colder.”

— Lemony Snicket

156. “Grief, a type of sadness that most often occurs when you have lost someone you love, is a sneaky thing, because it can disappear for a long time, and then pop back up when you least expect it.”

— Lemony Snicket

157. “I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively. I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip form slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory.”

— Lemony Snicket

158. “I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence, and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong.”

— Lemony Snicket

159. “The last safe place is safe no more.”

— Lemony Snicket

160. “If you are interested in happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not very many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters.”

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

162. “You know, there’s a big world out there filled with desperate orphans who would gladly swim across an ocean of thumbtacks just to be eclipsed by the long shadow that is cast by my accomplishments.”

— Lemony Snicket

163. “But if they were afraid of lemon meringue pie, this would be an irrational fear, because lemon meringue pie is delicious and has never hurt a soul.”

— Lemony Snicket

164. “In the meantime, it is best to grab what wonderful moments you find lying around.”

— Lemony Snicket

165. “A fluffy poached egg is a good breakfast, and a good breakfast is better than a bad one, like a good book is better than having your toe chopped off.”

— Lemony Snicket

166. “Get scared later, and if you’re scared now remember what Kit always said. If you’re not scared, she told me, it’s not bravery. And you want to be brave, don’t you, Snicket?”

— Lemony Snicket

167. “I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but first impressions are often entirely wrong.”

— Lemony Snicket

168. “I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before than, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar marks the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area.”

— Lemony Snicket

169. “It was an emergency,” Violet said calmly, “so I picked the lock.” “How did you do that?” Mr. Poe asked. “Nice girls shouldn’t know how to do such things.” “My sister is a nice girl,” Klaus said, “and she knows how to do all sorts of things.”

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

171. “Of course you can trust me,” Jake Hix said. “We read the same books.”

— Lemony Snicket

172. “Having a personal philosophy is like having a pet marmoset, because it may be very attractive when you acquire it, but there may be situations when it will not come in handy at all.”

— Lemony Snicket

173. “You cannot wait for an untroubled world to have an untroubled moment.”

— Lemony Snicket

174. “Stealing is not excusable if, for instance, you are in a museum and you decide that a certain painting would look better in your house, and you simply grab the painting and take it there. But if you were very, very hungry, and you had no way of obtaining money, it might be excusable to grab the painting, take it to your house, and eat it. “We.”

— Lemony Snicket

175. “Announcing your death should be like announcing that you are a lunar moth: It must be done quietly or it will not be believed.”

— Lemony Snicket

176. “It is a curious thing, but as one travels the world getting older and older, it appears that happiness is easier to get used to than despair... It is almost as if happiness is an acquire taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it.”

— Lemony Snicket

177. “The book was long, and difficult to read, and Klaus became more and more tired as the night wore on. Occasionally his eyes would close. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over.”

— Lemony Snicket

178. “There are two types of panicking: standing still and not saying a word, and leaping all over the place babbling anything that comes into your head.”

— Lemony Snicket

179. “Memento Mori’ means ‘Remember you will die.”

— Lemony Snicket

180. “Showing up early is one of the signs of a noble person...”

— Lemony Snicket

181. “The difference between the two sides of the schism, is that one side puts out fires, and the other starts them.”

— Lemony Snicket

182. “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.”

— Lemony Snicket

183. “Who knows what any of those people or fish would do in our shoes?” Violet said. “It’s impossible to know.”

— Lemony Snicket

184. “There are many, many types of books in the world, which makes good sense, because there are many, many types of people, and everybody wants to read something different. For instance, people who hate stories in which terrible things happen to small children should put this book down immediately.”

— Lemony Snicket

185. “There’s no way to tell what will make someone break down in tears. There are some who will cry at the merest melancholy word, and there are some who need the longest, cruelest speech to even dampen one eyelash. There are those who will cry at any sad song but no sad book, and there are those who are immune to the most saddening newspaper articles but will weep for days over a terrible meal. People cry at silence or at violence, in a graveyard or a schoolyard.”

— Lemony Snicket

186. “But one type of book that practically no one likes to read is a book about the law. Books about the law are notorious for being very long, very dull, and very difficult to read. This is one reason many lawyers make heaps of money. The money is an incentive – the word “incentive” here means “an offered reward to persuade you to do something you don’t want to do – to read long, dull, and difficult books.”

— Lemony Snicket

187. “You know about all the villainous people who are lurking in the hotel?” Klaus said, equally incredulously. “Yes,” Justice Strauss said. “We observed rings on all the wooden furniture, from people refusing to use coasters. Obviously there are many villains staying in the hotel.”

— Lemony Snicket

188. “Like everyone else, scientists are wrong from time to time, and it is easy to see that they are wrong about the table of the elements. Because although this table contains a great many elements, from the element oxygen, which is found in the air, to the element aluminum, which is found in cans of soda, the table of the elements does not contain one of the most powerful elements that make up our world, and that is the element of surprise.”

— Lemony Snicket

189. “We don’t need a destination or a way of navigating, because we’ll go wherever it takes us.”

— Lemony Snicket

190. “It was something from the earth or the sky or the sea, or from a dream or the pages of a book I wasn’t yet old enough to read, about monsters I wasn’t brave enough to face. Soon it was an immense noise that rattled everything in my body. It was the sound of being chased in a nightmare, or the blind and violent fury of a bad parent, a tantrum that deafened the ears of the living and slithered across the bones of the dead.”

— Lemony Snicket

191. “I’m afraid that’s the wicked way of the world. Everything’s covered in smoke and mirrors.”

— Lemony Snicket

192. “Pietrisycamollaviadelrechiotemexity,” Sunny said, which you will probably recall means something along the lines of “I must admit I don’t have the faintest idea of what is going on.” Sunny had now said this particular thing three times over the course of her life, and she was beginning to wonder if this was something she was only going to say more and more as she grew older.”

— Lemony Snicket

193. “I’m not a stranger,” I said, and pointed to his book. “I’m someone who reads the same authors you do.”

— Lemony Snicket

194. “I wasn’t sad the way a spider isn’t an insect.”

— Lemony Snicket

195. “Members of your family might say they are working hard all day long, while you are off at school or clarinet lessons, but the only way to know this for sure is to follow them at a discreet distance.”

— Lemony Snicket

196. “Nobody can teach you how to like something. You can like it, or you can pretend to like it, in order to make someone happy.”

— Lemony Snicket

197. “The word “bubble” is in the dictionary, for instance, as is the word “peacock,” the word “vacation,” and the words “the” “author’s” “execution” “has” “been” “canceled,” which make up a sentence that is always pleasant to hear.”

— Lemony Snicket

198. “Arguing with somebody is never pleasant, but sometimes it is useful and necessary to do so. Just the other day, for example, it was useful and necessary for me to have an unpleasant argument with a medical student because if he hadn’t let me borrow his speedboat I would now be chained inside a very small waterproof room, instead of sitting in a typewriter factory typing our this woeful tale.”

— Lemony Snicket

199. “The last time I saw you, I was trying to throw thumbtacks into your cradle!”

— Lemony Snicket

200. “They are stupid, aren’t they?” Dr. Orwell agreed, as though they were talking about the weather instead of insulting young children.”

— Lemony Snicket