Lemony Snicket

“Are you who I think you are?”

“Someone feeling wronged is like someone feeling thirsty. Don’t tell them they aren’t. Sit with them and have a drink.”

“the table of elements does not contain one of the most powerful elements that make up our world, and that is the element of surprise.”

“Cijeli svoj život Klaus je vjerovao da ako čitaš dovoljno knjiga, možeš riješiti bilo koji problem, no sad više nije bio siguran.”

“Money is like a child—rarely unaccompanied. When it disappears, look to those who were supposed to be keeping an eye on it while you were at the grocery store. You might also look for someone who has a lot of extra children sitting around, with long, suspicious explanations for how they got there.”

“Nobody wants to fall into a safety net, because it means the structure in which they've been living is in a state of collapse and they have no choice but to tumble downwards. However, it beats the alternative.”

“If you try to avoid every instance of peer pressure you will end up without any peers whatsoever, and the trick is to succumb to enough pressure that you do not drive your peers away, but not so much that you end up in a situation in which you are dead or otherwise uncomfortable. This is a difficult trick, and most people never master it, and end up dead or uncomfortable at least once during their lives.”

“People who say money doesn’t matter are like people who say cake doesn’t matter—it’s probably because they’ve already had a few slices.”

“I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where we once were so close that we could slip the curved straw, and the long, slender spoon, between our lips and fingers respectively. I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory, and your memory faced by distant fog, and your fog memorized by a distant face, and your distance distanced by the memorized memory of a foggy fog. I will love you no matter where you go and who you see, no matter where you avoid and who you don’t see, and no matter who sees you avoiding where you go. I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this, and no matter how I am discovered after what happens to me as I am discovering this.”

“Goodness! Golly! Good God! Blessed Allah! Zeus and Hera! Mary and Joseph! Nathaniel Hawthorne! Don't touch her! Grab her! Move closer! Run away! Don't move! Kill the snake! Leave it alone! Give it some food! Don't let it bite her! Lure the snake away! Here, snakey! Here, snakey snakey!”

“and what might seem to be a series of unfortunate events may in fact be the first steps of a journey.”

“Writing is a dying form. One reads of this every day.”

“I will love you as a drawer loves a secret compartment, and as a secret compartment loves a secret, and as a secret loves to make a person gasp, and as a gasping person loves a glass of brandy to calm their nerves, and as a glass of brandy loves to shatter on the floor, and as the noise of glass shattering loves to make someone else gasp, and as someone else gasping loves a nearby desk to lean against, even if leaning against it presses a lever that loves to open a drawer and reveal a secret compartment. I will love you until all such compartments are discovered and opened, and until all the secrets have gone gasping into the world.”

“I am so tired, I can hardly type these worfs.”

“Never mind what my name is,” the man said. “No one can pronounce it anyway. Just call me Sir.”

“The story of the Baudelaires takes place in a very real world, where some people are laughed at just because they have something wrong with them, and where children can find themselves all alone in the world, struggling to understand the mystery that surrounds them.”

“What a schmuck!”

“Count Olaf certainly does sound evil. Imagine forcing children to stand near a stove!”

“Friends can make you feel that the world is smaller and less sneaky than it really is, because you know people who have similar experiences.”

“Everybody will die, but very few people want to be reminded of that fact.”

“Are you ready?" Klaus asked finally."No," Sunny answered."Me neither," Violet said, "but if we wait until we're ready we'll be waiting for the rest of our lives, Let's go.”

“Life never end when you are in it.”

“It is much, much worse to receive bad news through the written word than by somebody simply telling you, and I’m sure you understand why. When somebody simply tells you bad news, you hear it once, and that’s the end of it. But when bad news is written down, whether in a letter or a newspaper or on your arm in felt tip pen, each time you read it, you feel as if you are receiving the bad news again and again.”

“An apocryphal story - the word "apocryphal" here means "obviously untrue" - tells of two people, long ago, who were very bored, and that instead of complaining about it they sat up all night and invented the game of chess so that everyone else in the world, on evenings when there is nothing to do, can also be bored by the perplexing and tedious game they invented.”

“The difference between a house and a home is like the difference between a man and a woman-- it might be embarrassing to explain, but it would be very unusual to get them confused.”

“There are two types of panicking: standing still and not saying a word, and leaping all over the place babbling anything that comes into your head.”

“Figuratively, they escaped from Cout Olaf and their miserable existence. They did not literally escape, because they were still in his house and vulnerable to Olaf's evil in loco parentis ways.”

“It dawned on them that unlike Aunt Josephine, who had lived up in that house, sad and alone, the three children had one another for comfort and support over the course of their miserable lives. And while this did not make them feel entirely safe, or entirely happy, it made them feel appreciative.They leaned up against one another appreciatively, and small smiles appeared on their damp and anxious faces. They had each other. I'm not sure that "The Beaudelaires had each other" is the moral of this story, but to the three siblings it was enough. To have each other in the midst of their unfortunate lives felt like having a sailboat in the middle of a hurricane, and to the Beaudelaire orphans this felt very fortunate indeed.”

“Neither were you [born yesterday], unless of course I am wrong, in which case welcome to the world, little baby, and congratulations on learning to read so early in life. ”

“For some stories, it's easy. The moral of 'The Three Bears,' for instance, is "Never break into someone else's house.' The moral of 'Snow White' is 'Never eat apples.' The moral of World War I is 'Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand.”

“Sometimes words are not enough.”

“It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between "literally" and "figuratively." If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feels like it is happening. If you are literally jumping for joy, for instance, it means you are leaping in the air because you are very happy. If you are figuratively jumping for joy, it means you are so happy that you could jump for joy, but are saving your energy for other matters.”

“Sometimes, just saying that you hate something, and having someone agree with you, can make you feel better about a terrible situation.”

“it is a sad truth in life that when someone has lost a loved one, friends sometimes avoid the person, just when the presence of friends is most needed.”

“I go to bed early and rise late and feel as if I have hardly slept, probably because I have been reading almost the entire time.”

“Fetching objects for people who are too lazy to fetch them for themselves is never a pleasant task, particularly when the people are insulting you.”

“Composer” is a word which here means “a person who sits in a room, muttering and humming and figuring out what notes the orchestra is going to play.” This is called composing. But last night, the Composer was not muttering. He was not humming. He was not moving, or even breathing. This is called decomposing.”

“The Violins waltzed. The Cellos and Basses provided accompaniment. The Violas mourned their fate, while the Concertmaster showed off. The Flutes did bird imitations…repeatedly, and the reed instruments had the good taste to admire my jacket. The Trumpets held a parade in honor of our great nation, while the French Horns waxed nostalgic about something or other. The Trombones had too much to drink. The Percussion beat the band, and the Tuba stayed home playing cards with his landlady, the Harp, taking sips of warm milk a blue little cup.“But the Composer is still dead.”

“Wherever there’s a conductor, you’re sure to find a dead composer!”

“The quoting of an aphorism, like the angry barking of a dog or the smell of overcooked broccoli, rarely indicates that something helpful is about to happen.”

“Sometimes when someone tells a ridiculous lie, it is best to ignore it entirely.”

“Never look a gift lion in the mouth.”

“Waiting is one of life’s hardships.”

“There are some who go through life with a shadow hanging over them, particularly if they live in a building which has long wide awnings.”

“The thing you hope will never happen to you might just happen to someone else instead, who has been spending their life dreading the thing that will happen to you.”

“Death is something you cannot escape, such as death, or a cheesecake that has curdled, both of which always turn up sooner later.”

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

“Announcing your death should be like announcing that you are a lunar moth: It must be done quietly or it will not be believed.”

“Normally it is not polite to go into somebody’s room without knocking, but you can make an exception if the person is dead, or pretending to be dead.”

“There are many difficult things in this world to hide, but a secret is not one of them.”