"You cannot wait for an untroubled world to have an untroubled moment. The terrible phone call, the rainstorm, the sinister knock on the door—they will all come. Soon enough arrive the treacherous villain and the unfair trial and the smoke and the flames of the suspicious fires to burn everything away. In the meantime, it is best to grab what wonderful moments you find lying around."
"It's hard when you're missing your family," Pip said, and started the motor. " You wake up every morning like someone took one of your legs."
"It’s hard when you’re missing your family. You wake up every morning like someone took one of your legs."
"Get scared later, and if you're scared now remember what Kit always said. If you're not scared, she told me, it's not bravery. And you want to be brave, don't you, Snicket?"
"The story of the book filled the car with exciting adventures of the sort that are fun to read about, so we didn’t have to think about the exciting adventures of the sort that are no fun to live through."
"Everyone tells you it's all right to cry, but not enough people say it's all right if you don't want people to know."
"We represent the true human condition, the one permanent victory over cruelty and chaos. . . . Our true home is the imagination, and our kingdom is the wide-open world."
"The trouble with being patient is that eventually you get tired of it."
"Terrible fires resemble terrible people. They are unpredictable. They are selfish. they are deadly and ruinous. And no matter where they are prowling, no matter what treachery they are cooking up, they have something in common. They can be stopped."
"When you find the sort of people who will show up to give you a ride exactly when they've promised to do so, hold on to them for dear life."
"There's no way to tell what will make someone break down in tears. There are some who will cry at the merest melancholy word, and there are some who need the longest, cruelest speech to even dampen one eyelash. There are those who will cry at any sad song but no sad book, and there are those who are immune to the most saddening newspaper articles but will weep for days over a terrible meal. People cry at silence or at violence, in a graveyard or a schoolyard."
"If you're not scared, she told me, it's not bravery."
"It is unwise to make something permanent when the whole world is shifting."
"But some secrets are so strange and so dangerous that showing them to people makes the strangeness and the danger pour into their lives like a dark, dark ink."
"People who think nothing could go wrong are usually disappointed."
"There are some things you cannot explain to anyone, even whey they have been explained to you, over and over, almost since the day you were born."
"Are you saying that being a criminal is a matter of opinion?" I asked.Qwerty smiled, but it was sad around the edges. "No," he said. "It's a matter of handcuffs."
"It was another thing you didn't learn at a top-drawer school. Bickering is like baldness or lousy gifts. It runs in families."
"You don't spend your life hanging around books without learning a thing or two."
"We both wanted to know each other's secrets, and we both wanted the other person to go first."
"The world is swirling with so many mysteries and secrets that nobody will ever track down all of them. But with a book you can stay up very late, reading until all the secrets are clear to you. The questions of the world are hidden forever, but the answers in a book are hiding in plain sight."
"People who think nothing can go wrong are usually disappointed."
"I like a story that could never happen to me. If I want real life I'll read a newspaper."
"You cannot have a really terrific library without at least one terrific librarian, the way you cannot have a really terrific bedroom unless you can lock the door."
"It is always better to ask a question than to answer one."