Quotes from Daniel Handler

Having an aura of menace is like having a pet weasel, because you rarely meet someone who has one, and when you do, it makes you want to hide under the coffee table.

Complimenting someone in an exaggerated way is known as flattery, and flattery will generally get you anything you want.

She gave me a hug and for a second I was embraced by a body that makes me want to go home and never eat again.

I think we'll always miss our parents. But I think we can miss them without being miserable all the time. After all, they wouldn't want us to be miserable.

My first novel took almost six years to sell and was rejected 37 times in the interim, and then finally sold for the smallest amount of money my literary agent had ever negotiated for a work of fiction.

Dead women tell no tales. Sad men write them down.

But it's December now, and the sky is bright, and it's clear to me. I'm telling you why we broke up, Ed. I'm writing it in this letter, the whole truth of why it happened. And the truth is that I goddamn loved you so much.

Take it back, Ed. Take it all back.

who would dare think that, forever? Some idiot girl who wouldn't know how things played out.

I have a dream of what would have happened if what happened instead hadn't.

If he's not gay and he hung out with you the whole time, he wanted to be. It's boyfriend or want to be boyfriend or I guess gay. Those are the choices.

Love is candy from a stranger, but it's candy you've had before and it probably won't kill you.

I waved but couldn't answer, because I was finally letting myself grin as wide as I'd wanted all afternoon, all evening, every sec of every minute with you, Ed. Shit, I guess I already loved you then. Doomed like a wineglass knowing it'll get dropped someday, shoes that'll be scuffed in no time, the new shirt you'll soon enough muck up filthy.

They say love's like a bus, and if you wait long enough another one will come along, but not in this place where the buses are slow and most of the cute ones are gay.

I want to love you and take you pretty places. Yes, I have things wrong, but also I can walk through walls if you'll let me show you.

You meet people who are in pain in life and love and you forgive them for behaving the way they do.

And then like a song we'd forgotten was even on the mix, you stepped into the house and my whole life.

She had the look in her eye when you kick and kick at the door and it doesn't open, when you write a boy letters and letters and he never loves you, not 'til the day he dies. Not even then.

Shit, I guess I already loved you then. Doomed like a wineglass knowing it'll get dropped someday, shoes that'll be scuffed in no time, the new shirt you'll soon enough muck up filthy.

I know you can't see it, not you, Ed, but maybe if I tell you the whole plot you'll understand it this once, because even now I want you to see it. I don't love you anymore, of course I don't, but there's still something I can show you. You know I want to be a director, but you never truly see the movies in my head and that, Ed, is why we broke up.

The whole thing of what I've been trying," you said, "is that you're different, and you keep asking about the other girls, but what I mean is that I don't think about them, because of the way you are.

Why not rise from the grave and terrorize a little instead of staying buried and dead in the cemetery?

I stand entwined in fire on the inextinguishable bonfire of inconceivable love.

I liked, I admit, that we didn't pretend there hadn't been other girls. There was always a girl on you in the halls at school, like they came free with a backpack.