Top 500 Lemony Snicket Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 7 of 10

301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “Coach Genghis rather.”

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

310. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

312. “The moral of World War I is ‘Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand.”

— Lemony Snicket

313. “There is no point in delaying crying. Sadness is like having a vicious alligator around. You can ignore it for only so long before it begins devouring things and you have to pay attention.”

— Lemony Snicket

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

320. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

322. “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

323. “There is nothing wicked about having a dreadful singing voice, any more than there is something wicked about having dreadful posture, dreadful cousins, or a dreadful pair of pants. Many noble and pleasant people have any number of these things, and there are even one or two kind individuals who have them all. But if you have something dreadful, and you force it upon someone else, then you have done something quite wicked indeed.”

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

325. “Those two Quagmires will whisk and whisk until they are simply whisked away.”

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

327. “And a refrigerator may hold a basket of strawberries, which would be important if a maniac said to you, “If you don’t give me a basket of strawberries right now, I’m going to poke you with this large stick.” But when the two elder Baudelaires and Quigley Quagmire opened the refrigerator, they found nothing that would help someone who was wounded, dying of thirst, or being threatened by a strawberry-crazed, stick-carrying maniac.”

— Lemony Snicket

328. “Baudelaire children had a slightly different.”

— Lemony Snicket

329. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

331. “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

332. “Not that kind of aristocracy,” I said with both feet on the floor. “Not an aristocracy of power, based on rank or wealth, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate, and the plucky. Our members are found in all nations and classes, and through the ages, and there is a secret understanding between us when we meet.”

— Lemony Snicket

333. “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.”

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “There have been only five burglars in the history of robbery who have specialized in rope. All five of these burglars were caught and sent to prison, which is why scarcely any people lock up their rope for safekeeping.”

— Lemony Snicket

339. “It is unwise to make something permanent when the whole world is shifting.”

— Lemony Snicket

340. “BRETT HELQUIST.”

— Lemony Snicket

341. “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

342. “The part libraries play in education is the part bubbles play in champagne. They may seem at first to be merely a shimmery addition, but they are the central feature of the entire enterprise and the reason, joyous and astonishing, to keep imbibing.”

— Lemony Snicket

343. “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

344. “There’s lots of sticky things here,” he said. “I see blackstrap molasses, wild clover honey, corn syrup, aged balsamic vinegar, apple butter, strawberry jam, caramel sauce, maple syrup, butterscotch topping, maraschino liqueur, virgin and extra-virgin olive oil, lemon curd, dried apricots, mango chutney, crema di noci, tamarind paste, hot mustard, marshmallows, creamed corn, peanut butter, grape preserves, salt water taffy, condensed milk, pumpkin pie filling, and glue.”

— Lemony Snicket

345. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

347. “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

348. “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

349. “You and I, of course, would never do this to any of our grieving acquaintances, but it is a sad truth in life that when someone has lost a loved one, friends sometimes avoid the person, just when the presence of friends is most needed. – P. 34.”

— Lemony Snicket

350. “Mr. Poe meant well, but a jar of mustard probably also means well and would do a better job of keeping the Baudelaires out of danger.”

— Lemony Snicket