Quotes from Daniel Handler

The thing with your heart's desire is that your heart doesn't even know what it desires until it turns up. Like a tie at a tag sale, some perfect thing in a crate of nothing, you were just there, uninvited, and now suddenly the party was over and you were all I wanted. I hadn't even been looking, not for you, and now you were my heart's desire.

Someone can break your heart, leave you dead on the lawn, and still you never learn what to say to stop it all over again.

How do you forget something? You just walk away from it, those who are still alive. There are so few clearings in our hearts and minds, so few places where something can't grow on top of whatever happened to us before, and this is love too.

This is love, to sit with someone you've known forever in a place you've been meaning to go, and watching as their life happens to them until you stand up and it's time to go.

This is like a cookie, it tastes like a cookie having sex with a doughnut.

They looked at each other like a pair of parentheses.

I hadn't even been looking, not for you, and now you were my heart's desire.

I'm not a believer in predetermined fates, being rewarded for one's efforts. I'm not a believer in karma. The reason why I try to be a good person is because I think it's the right thing to do. If I commit fewer bad acts there will be fewer bad acts, maybe other people will join in committing fewer bad acts, and in time there will be fewer and fewer of them.

Undeveloped, the whole thing,tossed into a box before we really had a chance to know what we had, and that's why we broke up.

It is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes; it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe.

A girl meets a boy, Ed, and everything changes, or so she says.

Take back the smile and the night, take it all back, I wish I could.

Twenty-six," you said. "One for each day we've been together, Min."Somebody oohed. Somebody shushed them. "And I hope that someday I'll do another something stupid and I'll have to say it a million times because that's how long it'll be, together with you, Min. With you.

there's not enough ink and paper to say all I wanted.

Frustration is an interesting emotional state, because it tends to bring out the worst in whoever is frustrated.

Members of your family might say they are working hard all day long, while you are off at school or clarinet lessons, but the only way to know this for sure is to follow them at a discreet distance.

The smell of cooking food is often a calming one.