Lemony Snicket

“Reader: Dear Mr. Snicket, What is the best way to keep a secret? Lemony Snicket : Tell it to everyone you know, but pretend you are kidding.”

“Inside these letters, the eye will seeNearby are your friends, and VFD.”

“My chauffer once told me that I would feel better in the morning, but when I woke up the two of us were still on a tiny island surrounded by man-eating crocodiles, and, as I'm sure you can understand, I didn't feel any better about it.”

“Other than a sign I saw once that said, 'Beware' in letters made of dead monkeys, the 'Lucky Smells Lumbermill' sign was the most disgusting sign on earth.”

“This feeling is not unlike the sinking in one's stomach when one is in an elevator that suddenly goes down, or when you are snug in your bed and your closet door suddenly creaks open to reveal the person who has been hiding there.”

“But we can also ask for something we are much more likely to get, and that is to find a person or two, somewhere in our travels, who will tell us that we are noble enough, whether it is true or not. We can ask for someone who will say, “You are noble enough,” and remind us of our good qualities when we have forgotten them, or cast them into doubt.”

“You’re noble enough, Baudelaires. That’s all we can ask for in this world.”

“It is my fate that some of my questions will never be answered.”

“I found myself facing a man and a woman who looked so much alike, they could only be twins, or two people who had been married for a very long time. They both had pear-shaped bodies with short, thick legs and grumpy-looking arms, and it looked like they had both tried on heads that were too small for them, and were about to ask the head clerk for a larger size.”

“...in life it is often the tiny details that end up being the most important.”

“You're the inventor," Klaus answered, buttoning his coat. "But you can't invent things like time,”

“Kiedy byliście mali, być może ktoś wam czytał banalną bajeczkę - słowo "banalną" znaczy tutaj: "niewartą czytania" - o chłopczyku, który wywoływał wilka z lasu. Bohaterem tej bajeczki jest mały męczydusza, który krzyczy "Wilk! Wilk!", chociaż wilka nie ma w pobliżu, i za każdym razem łatwowierni wieśniacy pędzą mu na pomoc, aby przekonać się, że to był tylko żart. Ale raz chłopczyk krzyknął "Wilk! Wilk!" wcale nie dla żartu - tylko nikt mu już nie przybiegł na pomoc. Wilk zjadł dowcipnisia, i na tym, Bogu dzięki, bajeczka się kończy.Morał z niej płynie oczywisty: "Nie osiedlaj się tam, gdzie wilki hasają na wolności" - chociaż ten, kto wam czytał tę bajeczkę, na pewno twierdzi, że jej morał brzmi: nie kłam, bo pożałujesz. Byłby to strasznie głupi morał, ponieważ wszyscy wiemy, że kłamstwo bywa czasem nie tylko pożyteczne, ale i wskazane.”

“A good thing to do when one is sitting, eating, and resting is to have a conversation.”

“There are some who say that sitting at home reading is the equivalent of travel, because the experiences described in the book are more or less the same as the experiences one might have on a voyages, and there are those who say that there is no substitute for venturing out into the world. My own opinion is that it is best to travel extensively but to read the entire time, hardly glancing up to look out of the window of the airplane, train, or hired camel.”

“Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending.”

“13. 99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree.”

“It is not always the job of people shouting outside impressive buildings to solve problems. It is often the job of the people inside, who have paper, pens, desks, and an impressive view.”

“When things don't go right, go left”

“There is no easy way to train an apprentice. My two tools are example and nagging.”

“We are respecting our parents' wishes....They didn't want to shelter us from the world's treacheries. They wanted us to survive them.”

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

“Sometimes, even the best of plans will occur to you when it is too late.”

“You can't believe everything you read.”

“Sometimes, even in the most unfortunate of lives, there will occur a moment or two of good fortune.”

“If you know somebody very well, like your grandmother or your baby sister, you will know when they are real and when they are fake.”

“Accidents happen all the time.”

“Even the best plans can change if there's an accident.”

“You may be right,' she said, a phrase which here meant 'I’m wrong, but I don’t have the courage to say so.”

“Every new promise was like something heavy I had to carry, with no place to put anything down.”

“Scolding must be very, very fun, otherwise children would be allowed to do it. It is not because children don’t have what it takes to scold. You need only three things, really. You need time, to think up scolding things to say. You need effort, to put these scolding things in a good order, so that the scolding can be more and more insulting to the person being scolded. And you need chutzpah, which is a word for the sort of show-offy courage it takes to stand in front of someone and give them a good scolding, particularly if they are exhausted and sore and not in the mood to hear it.”

“So you’re reluctant, I said to myself. Many, many people are reluctant. It’s like having feet. It’s nothing to brag about.”

“How do you do?" said Violet."How do you do?" said Klaus."Odo yow!" said Sunny.”

“It is always terrible to be told to go play with people one doesn’t know...”

“If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels; and if you haven’t, you cannot possibly imagine it.”

“How did you do that?” Mr. Poe asked. “Nice girls shouldn’t know how to do such things.”“My sister is a nice girl,” Klaus said, “and she knows how to do all sorts of things.”

“...there's nothing wrong with occasionally staring out the window and thinking nonsense, as long as the nonsense is yours.”

“There was something I was always very good at, however, and that was teaching myself not to be frightened while frightening things are going on. It is difficult to do this, but I had learned. It is simply a matter of putting one’s fear aside, like the vegetable on the plate you don’t want to touch until all of your rice and chicken are gone, and getting frightened later, when one is out of danger. Sometimes I imagine I will be frightened for the rest of my life because of all of the fear I put aside during my time in Stain’d-by-the-Sea.”

“There's an easy method for finding someone when you hear them scream. First get a clean sheet of paper and a sharp pencil. Then sketch out nine rows of fourteen squares each. Then throw the piece of paper away and find whoever is screaming so you can help them. It is no time to fiddle with paper.”

“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.”

“You can invent things like automatic popcorn poppers. You can invent things like steam-powered window washers. But you can’t invent more time.”

“The book did not say anything about a statue, valuable or otherwise, and so I stopped reading about the Bombinating Beast and got interested in the chapter about the Stain'd witches, who had ink instead of blood in their veins. I wondered what they kept in their pens.”

“There are many reasons, of course, why someone might snap their fingers and grin. If you heard some pleasing music, for instance, you might snap your fingers and grin to demonstrate that the music had charms that could soothe your savage breast. If you were employed as a spy, you might snap your fingers and grin in order to deliver a message in secret snapping-and-grinning code.”

“If only Uncle Monty knew what we know," Violet said, "and Stephano knew that he knew what we know. But Uncle Monty doesn't know what we know, and Stephano knows that he doesn't know what we know.""I know," Klause said."I know you know," Violet said”

“I have gone into town to buy a few last things we need for the expedition: Peruvian wasp repellent, toothbrushes, canned peaches, and a fireproof canoe. It will take a while to find the peaches, so don't expect me back until dinnertime. Stephano, Gustav's replacement, will arrive today by taxi. Please make him feel welcome. As you know, it is only two days until the expedition, so please work very hard today. Your giddy uncle, Monty”

“The word "dreadful," even when used three times in a row, did not seem like a dreadful enough word to describe everything that had happened.”

“Is the mask working?" she asked me."How can I tell?""If you can breath, then it's working.”

“The children of this world and the adults of this world are in entirely separate boats and only drift near each other when we need a ride from someone or when someone needs us to wash our hands.”

“It looked like something the Hemlock needed, or a piece of equipment a plumber had left behind. It looked like none of your business.”

“You must be all a-tingle with excitement.''I guess so,' I said, but I did not feel a-tingle. I did not feel a-anything.”

“Count Olaf sounds like an awful person. I hope he is torn apart by wild animals someday. Wouldn't that be satisfying?”