Top 500 Lemony Snicket Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “If you are trying to fool a farsighted or dimwitted person, a veiled facial disguise might be enough.”

— Lemony Snicket

302. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

304. “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

305. “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

306. “Asinine is a word that sounds like you shouldn’t say it, so when you do say it, people often gasp. This makes it a delicious way of saying ‘not very smart,’ which is all it means.”

— Lemony Snicket

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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. Of course, that other person might be pretending too, and so on and so on and so on, with all the world in a chain of pretense and distrust.”

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

315. “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

316. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

318. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

320. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

323. “Baudelaire children had a slightly different.”

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

325. “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

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

— Lemony Snicket

327. “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

328. “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

329. “BRETT HELQUIST.”

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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.”

— Lemony Snicket

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “It is curious to look at one’s family and try to imagine how they look to strangers.”

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

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

— Lemony Snicket

344. “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

345. “Please excuse the torn edges of this note. I am writing to you from inside the shack the Baudelaire orphans were forced to live in while at Prufrock Preparatory School, and I am afraid that some of the crabs tried to snatch my stationery away from me. On Sunday night, please purchase a ticket for seat 10-J at the Erratic Opera Company’s performance of the opera Faute de Mieux. During Act Five, use a sharp knife to rip open the cushion of your seat. There you should find.”

— Lemony Snicket

346. “In the secret pocket, she often kept a small pocket dictionary, which she would take out whenever she encountered a word she did not know.”

— Lemony Snicket

347. “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

348. “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

349. “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

350. “I am heartbroken, but I have been heartbroken before, and this might be the best for which I can hope.”

— Lemony Snicket