Quotes from Lemony Snicket

One of the greatest myths in the world - and the phrase 'greatest myths' is just a fancy way of saying 'big fat lies' - is that troublesome things get less and less troublesome if you do them more and more.... The truth is that troublesome things tend to remain troublesome no matter how many times you do them, and that you should avoid doing them unless they are absolutely urgent.

gingerly—the word "gingerly" here means "avoiding territorial crabs"—

Es inútil que os describa lo mal que se sintieron Violet, Klaus y Sunny el tiempo que siguió. Si habéis perdido a alguien muy importante para vosotros, ya sabéis lo que se siente; y, si nunca habéis perdido nadie, no os lo podéis imaginar.

The accident," she said finally, "happened because Klaus was hypnotized." "What your brother does for a hobby is none of my concern," Sir said.

The dark was real, though. It almost always is. The

Stop!" Jerome Squalor pleaded. "In the name of injustice!

A rug feels like a lion, but that doesn't mean you can ride it.

It is true, of course, that there is no way of knowing for sure whether or not you can trust someone, for the simple reason that circumstances change all of the time.

Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant, filled with odd waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.

Just because you can picture something does not make it so.

She crawled in front of the Baudelaires' guardian and bared her teeth at Captain Sham.

With any word, there are subconscious associations, which simply means that certain words make you think of certain things, even if you don't want to.

the world, no matter how monstrously it may be threatened, has never been known to succumb entirely. The

But just because you can picture something does not make it so.

It was another thing you didn't learn at a top-drawer school. Bickering is like baldness or lousy gifts. It runs in families.

Hello?" Violet said finally. The telephone said nothing. "Hello?" Violet said again. "Hello? Hello?" The telephone did not answer.

Mr. Poe opened his mouth to say something, but erupted into a brief fit of coughing. "I have made arrangements," he said finally, "for you to be raised by a distant relative of yours who lives on the other side of town. His name is Count Olaf.

As I'm sure you know, a good night's sleep helps you perform well in school, and so if you are a student you should always get a good night's sleep unless you have come to the good part of your book, and then you should stay up all night and let your schoolwork fall by the wayside, a phrase which means "flunk." In

I can compare the pencil I am using to write these words (and these words, and these and these) to my own life, because it is sometimes sharp and sometimes dull, because it is getting shorter and shorter the more I use it, and because even when I try to erase things you can still see the marks they left behind.

I said that if she won I would tell all of you something I learned about her this summer. Jackie Woodson is allergic to watermelon. Just let that sink in your minds. I said, 'You have to put that in a book.' And she said, 'You put that in a book.' And I said, 'I'm only writing a book about a black girl who's allergic to watermelon if you, Cornel West, Toni Morrison and Barack Obama say, 'This guy's OK.

It is now necessary for me to use the rather hackneyed phrase 'meanwhile, back at the ranch.' The word 'hackneyed' here means 'used by so, so many writers that by the time Lemony Snicket uses it, it is a tiresome cliché.

The curious thing about being told to sleep on it - a phrase which here means, as I'm sure you know, 'to go to bed thinking about something and reach a conclusion in the morning' - is that you usually can't. If you are thinking over a dilemma, you are likely to toss and turn all night long, thinking over terrible things that can happen and trying to imagine what in the world you can do about it, and these circumstances are unlikely to result in any sleeping at all.

Klaus had known for all twelve of his years that his older sister found a hand on her shoulder comforting—as long as the hand was attached to an arm, of course.

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 a few seconds, all because of a bus. Everybody will die, but very few people want to be reminded of that fact. The