Top 500 Lemony Snicket Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “The quoting of an aphorism, like the angry barking of a dog or the smell of overcooked broccoli, rarely indicates that something helpful is about to happen.”

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

253. “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

254. “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

255. “I write storys to entertain not to be the best.”

— Lemony Snicket

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “Blinded following the Blindfolded.”

— 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 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

262. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

265. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

269. “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

270. “Bluh bluh bluh,” Klaus bluhed.”

— Lemony Snicket

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

274. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

278. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

280. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “I will love you if you don’t marry me. I will love you if you marry someone else... and I will love you if you never marry at all, and spend your years wishing you had married me after all, and I must say that on late, cold nights I prefer this scenario out of all the scenarios I have mentioned. That, Beatrice, is how I will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way.”

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

— Lemony Snicket

296. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

298. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

300. “I had seen buildings burn before, as part of my training and as part of my childhood. I had seen small homes and enormous mansions devoured by fire, and I had seen flames destroy factories and symphony halls and houses of worship. A school seems worse, I thought as the fire roared into the sky. Even when the school is empty, it’s a terrible thing.”

— Lemony Snicket