Top 500 Lemony Snicket Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “Impertinent is a word which actually means not suitable to the circumstances, but most people use it to mean I am using a complicated word in hopes that it will make you stop talking...”

— Lemony Snicket

253. “I was in my favorite seat in the library, but it wasn’t helping me like the book any better. It was a book people kept putting in my hands and telling me I was going to love, the way the doctor tells you the needle won’t hurt a bit. The book began the way it always began before I gave up on it: with a man carrying around a drawing or a snake that had just eaten, and asking people what they thought of it. I thought it was no way to start up a conversation.”

— Lemony Snicket

254. “Sooner or later, everyone’s story has an unfortunate event or two – a schism or a death, a fire or a mutiny, the loss of a home or the destruction of a tea set. The only solution, of course, is to stay as far away from the world as possible and lead a safe, simple life.”

— Lemony Snicket

255. “The truth is that you can never be sure if you have decided on the right thing until the party is over, and by then it is too late to go back and change your mind, which is why the world is filled with people doing terrible things and wearing ugly clothing, and so few volunteers who are able to stop them.”

— Lemony Snicket

256. “Miracles are like meatballs, because nobody can exactly agree what they are made of, where they come from, or how often they should appear. Some people say that a sunrise is a miracle, because it is somewhat mysterious and often very beautiful, but other people say it is simply a fact of life, because it happens every day and far too early in the morning.”

— Lemony Snicket

257. “If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other books. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.”

— Lemony Snicket

258. “Triplets are when four babies are born at the same time, and there are only two Quagmires.”

— Lemony Snicket

259. “The sky was dark blue twilight, pretty to look at but lonely to walk under.”

— Lemony Snicket

260. “When you think of me,” she said quietly “think of a food you love very much.”

— Lemony Snicket

261. “All these things are miracles. It is a miracle if you can find true friends, and it is a miracle if you have enough food to eat, and it is a miracle if you get to spend your days and evenings doing whatever it is you like to do.”

— Lemony Snicket

262. “If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.”

— Lemony Snicket

263. “Like a church bell, a coffin, and a vat of melted chocolate, a supply closet is rarely a comfortable place to hide.”

— Lemony Snicket

264. “Wishing is merely a quiet way to spend one’s time before the candles are extinguished on one’s birthday cake.”

— Lemony Snicket

265. “One could say, in fact, that no story really has a beginning, and that no story really has an end, as all of the world’s stories are as jumbled as the items in the arboretum, with their details and secrets all heaped together so that the whole story, from beginning to end, depends on how you look at it.”

— Lemony Snicket

266. “Never look a gift lion in the mouth.”

— Lemony Snicket

267. “The Baudelaire orphans hung on to one another, and wept and wept while the adults argued endlessly behind them. Finally-as, I’m sorry to say, Count Olaf forced the Quagmires into puppy costumes so he could sneak them onto the airplane without anyone noticing-the Baudelaires cried themselves out and just sat on the lawn together in weary silence.”

— Lemony Snicket

268. “As I’m sure you know, a good night’s sleep helps you perform well in school, and so if you are a student you should always get a good night’s sleep unless you have come to the good part of your book, and then you should stay up all night and let your schoolwork fall by the wayside, a phrase which here means ’flunk.”

— Lemony Snicket

269. “And a town not too far from where you live has a law that bars me from coming within five miles of its borders.”

— Lemony Snicket

270. “It doesn’t matter if you never see someone again, I told myself. There are millions of people in the world, and most of them never see each other in the first place. You hoped to know Ellington Feint forever, but there’s no such thing as forever, really. Everything is much shorter than that.”

— Lemony Snicket

271. “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

272. “But the law is an odd thing. For instance, one country in Europe has a law that requires all its bakers to sell bread at the exact same price. A certain island has a law that forbids anyone from removing its fruit. And a town not too far from where you live has a law that bars me from coming within five miles of its borders.”

— Lemony Snicket

273. “Blinded following the Blindfolded.”

— Lemony Snicket

274. “Mr. Poe was kindhearted, but it is not enough in this world to be kindhearted, particularly if you are responsible for keeping children out of danger.”

— Lemony Snicket

275. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

277. “It was a puzzle, a dark and lonely one, and if I were a piece in this puzzle, I did not know where it belonged. I needed to put myself aside, just for a little while, until I saw where I might fit in.”

— Lemony Snicket

278. “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

279. “You might compare your pimple situation to that of someone who was being eaten by a bear, and when you looked in the mirror at your ugly pimple, you could say to yourself, “Well, at least I’m not being eaten by a bear.”

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

281. “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

282. “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

283. “Sometimes, and having someone agree with you, can make you feel better about a terrible situation. “I hate everything about our lives right now, Klaus,” she said, “but we have to keep our chin up.” This was an expression the children’s father had used, and it meant “try to stay cheerful.” -P. 32.”

— Lemony Snicket

284. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

287. “Wherever you can find a honeydew melon, you can find other melons. All other melons are better. There is really no point to having a honeydew melon under any circumstances whatsoever.”

— Lemony Snicket

288. “Anyone who knew Violet well could tell she was thinking hard, because her long hair was tied up in a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes. Violet had a real knack for inventing and building strange devices, so her brain was often filled with images of pulleys, levers, and gears, and she never wanted to be distracted by something as trivial as her hair.”

— Lemony Snicket

289. “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

290. “Coach Genghis rather.”

— Lemony Snicket

291. “If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels; and if you haven’t, you cannot possibly imagine it.”

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

293. “To hear the phrase “our only hope” always makes one anxious, because it means that if the only hope doesn’t work, there is nothing left, and that is never pleasant to think about, however true it might be.”

— Lemony Snicket

294. “Humanity must perforce prey upon itself, like monsters of the deep,” a.”

— Lemony Snicket

295. “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

296. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

298. “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

299. “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

300. “Off with you” is a phrase used by people who lack the curtesy to say something more polite, such as, “if there’s nothing else you require I must be going” or “I’m sorry but I’m going to have to ask you to leave, please” or even “excuse me but I believe you have mistaken my home for your own and my valuable belongings for yours and I must ask you to return the items in question to me and leave my home after untying me from this chair, as I’m unable to do it myself, if it’s not too much trouble.”

— Lemony Snicket