Top 500 Lemony Snicket Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “To be daunted by no difficulty; to keep heart when all have lost it; to go through intrigue spotless; to forgo even ambition when the end is gained – who can say this is not greatness?”

— Lemony Snicket

252. “Every night I give a violin recital for six hours, and attendance is mandatory. The word ‘mandatory’ means that if you don’t show up, you have to buy me a large bag of candy and watch me eat it.”

— Lemony Snicket

253. “You cannot have a really terrific library without at least one terrific librarian, the way you cannot have a really terrific bedroom unless you can lock the door.”

— Lemony Snicket

254. “Being noble enough is all we can ask for in this world.”

— Lemony Snicket

255. “The curious thing about being told to sleep on it – a phrase which here means, as I’m sure you know, ‘to go to bed thinking about something and reach a conclusion in the morning’ – is that you usually can’t. If you are thinking over a dilemma, you are likely to toss and turn all night long, thinking over terrible things that can happen and trying to imagine what in the world you can do about it, and these circumstances are unlikely to result in any sleeping at all.”

— Lemony Snicket

256. “You don’t spend your life hanging around books without learning a thing or two.”

— Lemony Snicket

257. “Nevermore Tree was gargantuan, a word which here means ’having attained an inordinate amount of botanical volume.”

— Lemony Snicket

258. “Being curious is the most important part of being a journalist. It might be the most important part of being anything.”

— Lemony Snicket

259. “The hallway was lined with numbered doors, odd numbers on one side and even numbers on the other, and large ornamental vases, too large to hold flowers and too small to hold spies.”

— Lemony Snicket

260. “You may want to keep a commonplace book which is a notebook where you can copy parts of books you think are in code, or take notes on a series of events you may have observed that are suspicious, unfortunate, or very dull. Keep your commonplace book in a safe place, such as underneath your bed, or at a nearby dairy.”

— Lemony Snicket

261. “It’s hard when you’re missing your family. You wake up every morning like someone took one of your legs.”

— Lemony Snicket

262. “There is a kind of crying I hope you have not experienced, and it is not just crying about something terrible that has happened, but a crying for all of the terrible things that have happened, not just to you but to everyone you know and to everyone you don’t know and even the people you don’t want to know, a crying that cannot be diluted by a brave deed or a kind word, but only by someone holding you as your shoulders shake and your tears run down your face.”

— Lemony Snicket

263. “Aunt Josephine had been so careful to avoid anything that she thought might harm her, but harm had still come her way.”

— Lemony Snicket

264. “It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between “literally” and “figuratively.” If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feels like it’s happening. If you are literally jumping for joy, for instance, it means you are leaping in the air because you are very happy. If you are figuratively jumping for joy, it means you are so happy that you could jump for joy, but are saving your energy for other matters.”

— Lemony Snicket

265. “Oh, no,” he said. “We don’t read the newspaper. It’s too depressing. Our motto is ‘No news is good news.”

— Lemony Snicket

266. “Stop!” Jerome Squalor pleaded. “In the name of injustice!”

— Lemony Snicket

267. “It is unwise to make something permanent when the whole world is shifting. There may be a time when this symbol means something treacherous and terrible, rather than something noble and literate.”

— Lemony Snicket

268. “Bluh bluh bluh,” Klaus bluhed.”

— Lemony Snicket

269. “Everybody will die, of course, sooner or later. Circus performers will die, and clarinet experts will die, and you and I will die, and there might be a person who lives on your block, right now, who is not looking both ways before he crosses the street and who will die in just in a few seconds, all because of a bus. Everybody will die, but very few people want to be reminded of that fact.”

— Lemony Snicket

270. “There is a popular game in which one person says something to another, and that person says it to another, and so on and so on, and all the while the message is getting more and more garbled until it is nonsense. The game is called “living in the world” and has been played for thousands of years.”

— Lemony Snicket

271. “So you’re a real person! I always thought you were a legendary figure, like unicorns or Giuseppe Verdi.”

— Lemony Snicket

272. “How could she live?” he asked. “She betrayed me. She betrayed all of us. How could someone so wonderful do something so terrible?”

— Lemony Snicket

273. “What do your parents know, about surviving?”

— Lemony Snicket

274. “It is likely your own eyes were closed when you were born, so that you left the safe place of your mother’s womb – or, if you are a seahorse, your father’s yolk sac – and joined the treachery of the world without seeing exactly where you were going.”

— Lemony Snicket

275. “If you are trying to fool a farsighted or dimwitted person, a veiled facial disguise might be enough.”

— Lemony Snicket

276. “I told you,” Count Olaf said weakly. “I told you I’d do that one last time.”

— Lemony Snicket

277. “There was a philosopher who said that all of life is just shadows. He said that people were just sitting in a cave, watching shadows on the cave wall. Aye – shadows of something much bigger and grander than themselves.”

— Lemony Snicket

278. “You might think that climbing a mountain is half the battle, only to find out that the mountain goats who live at the top are vicious, and heavily armed.”

— Lemony Snicket

279. “And if you jump for joy, you have a very good chance of experiencing a painful bump on the head, unless you make sure you are standing someplace with very high ceilings, which joyous people rarely do.”

— Lemony Snicket

280. “I thought maybe if I stared hard enough, I could see the lights of the city I had left so very far behind. This was nonsense, of course, but there’s nothing wrong with occasionally staring out the window and thinking nonsense, as long as the nonsense is yours.”

— Lemony Snicket

281. “Stealing, of course, is a crime, and a very impolite thing to do. But like most impolite things, it is excusable under certain circumstances. 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 would be excusable to grab the painting, take it to your house, and eat it.”

— Lemony Snicket

282. “Telling an adult to go see something for themselves always works. They never take your word for it. They always, always, have to go see, and Hungry was no different.”

— Lemony Snicket

283. “People often forget to look at something right in front of them.”

— Lemony Snicket

284. “Whether is was Uncle Monty’s library of reptile books, or Aunt Josephine’s library of grammar books, or Justice Strauss’s library of law books, or, best of all their parents’ library of all kinds of books – all burn up now, alas – libraries always made them feel a little better. Just knowing that they could read made the Baudelaire orphans feel as if their wretched lives could be a little brighter.”

— Lemony Snicket

285. “Sometimes things can go on right in front of your nose, but you don’t know about them.”

— Lemony Snicket

286. “Not only am I intelligent,” Genghis agreed, “but I’m also very smart.”

— Lemony Snicket

287. “It was Stephano, or, if you prefer, it was Count Olaf. It was the bad guy.”

— Lemony Snicket

288. “The right hand doesn’t know what the left is doing” is a phrase that refers to times when people ought to know, but don’t know, about something that is happening very close to them. For instance, you ought to know about the man who watches you when you sleep.”

— Lemony Snicket

289. “There was a town, and there was a girl, and there was a theft. I was living in the town, and I was hired to investigate the theft, and I thought the girl had nothing to do with it. I was almost thirteen and I was wrong. I was wrong about all of it. I should have asked the question ‘Why would somebody say something was stolen when it was never theirs in the first place?’ Instead, I asked the wrong question – four wrong questions, more or less.”

— Lemony Snicket

290. “I will love you as a cufflink loves to drop from its shirt and explore the party for itself.”

— Lemony Snicket

291. “So unless you have been very, very lucky, you know that a good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit. So.”

— Lemony Snicket

292. “The whole thing is like a jigsaw puzzle, but there are too many missing pieces to solve it.”

— Lemony Snicket

293. “One cannot spend forever sitting and solving the mysteries of one’s history, and no matter how much one reads, the whole story can never be told.”

— Lemony Snicket

294. “But you can’t invent things like time,′ Violet said. ‘You can invent things like automatic popcorn poppers. You can invent things like steam-powered window waster. But you can’t invent more time.”

— Lemony Snicket

295. “But some secrets are so strange and so dangerous that showing them to people makes the strangeness and the danger pour into their lives like a dark, dark ink.”

— Lemony Snicket

296. “But finally, into the world came a baby girl, just as, I’m very, very sorry to say, her mother, and my sister, slipped away from the world after a long night of suffering – but also a night of joy, as the birth of a baby is always good news, no matter how much bad news the baby will hear later.”

— Lemony Snicket

297. “Busman’s holiday” is an expression which refers to when people do the same thing on vacation that they do in their everyday lives, such as plumbers who visit the Museum of Sinks, or villains who disguise themselves even on their days off.”

— Lemony Snicket

298. “It is true, of course, that you never know. A new experience can be extremely pleasurable, or extremely irritating, or somewhere in between, and you never know until you try it out.”

— Lemony Snicket

299. “Count Olaf sounds like an awful person. I hope he is torn apart by wild animals someday.”

— Lemony Snicket

300. “Ellington Feint was a line in my mind running right down the middle of my life, separating the formal training of my childhood and the territory of the rest of my days. She was an axis, and at that moment and for many moments afterward, my entire world revolved around her.”

— Lemony Snicket