Quotes from Daniel Handler

We steal the happiness of others in order to be happy ourselves, and when it is stolen from us we voyage desperately to steal it back.

When do you learn that the world, like any diner worth its salt, is open twenty-four hours a day?

I'm not a cuckoo, either. I'm a fool is what.

Dark, light, dark, light, dark-I swung and missed.

I'm sitting on the lumbering late bus, thinking about the way I'm going to start my Monday: by filling out an unexcused absence form for the cranky secretary. The last time the bus was late she actually told me, Don't tell me the bus was late. That excuse won't work anymore today. About ten kids ahead of you said that their bus was late, too. I tried to explain that we all took the same bus, but there was no pulling the wool over her eyes. She wasn't born yesterday.

That night it felt that somehow by flicking them off the roof, the matches would burn down everything, the sparks from the tips of the flames, torching the world and all the heartbroken people in it.

Not like we were going to be forever. I mean, who would dare think that, forever? Some idiot girl who wouldn't know how things played out.

I'm a lunatic wandering around for scraps.

Everyone on earth would never starve and forever find love and happiness, since we won, but if we'd lost, they would have gouged out our eyes and thrown us naked onto hot coals and poisonous snakes for all the cheering and hugging at the end, strangers hugging like the end of The Omega Virus when Steve Sturmine finds the antidote.

It's not the makeup and it's not the way that you dance and this is like love too where there's only one dancer who will win your contest that night and they are not particularly the best one

The file clanked against me, my stupid idea nobody would have gotten had I ever done it. You even wouldn't have gotten it, Ed, I thought, watching her go. It's why we broke up, so here it is. Ed, how could you?

I want you to love me in particular.

She licked her lips and then wiped them on her hand, her dark lipstick staining her wrist like a suicide.

lately it has become more and more difficult to attend dinner parties without the evening ending in gunfire or tapioca...

Every time you said it, you really said it. It wasn't like a sequel where Hollywood just lines up the same actors and hopes it works again. It was like a remake with a new director and crew trying something else and starting from scratch.

We are a nation of children letting horrible things happen, and flunking Calc.

Do you do them in that old-fashioned code,like daffodils mean I'm sorry I was late, daisies mean sorry I embarrassed you in front of your friends, these things here fanned out mean just thinking of you?Or did you just have them throw whatever was pretty together?

You winked, took the change. I should have seen it, Ed, as a sign that you were unreliable. Instead, I saw it as a sign of charming, which is why I didn't break it off right then and there.

I'm nothing, not a single thing. The only particle I had, the only tiny thing raising me up, is that I was Ed Slaterton's girlfriend, loved by you for like ten secs, and who cares, so what, and not anymore so how embarrassing for me.

December 5 is what I saw as we walked together on October 5, let's go, let's go together toward something extraordinary and I started making plans, thinking we would get that far.

You're a ghost! Eddie cried. You're empty and you have nothing inside you.

He who wants the world must first escape from it.

We laughed the rest of the way, because the point of this story is, it is not the cookies. It is the love.

It is often said that reading is a gift, but to my mind that is an insufficient description, for the size of the gift of reading is so vast that it is difficult to see what is outside its wrapping.