210 Lemony Snicket Quotes to Live a Wiser Life

2. “Anyone who thinks the pen is mightier than the sword has not been stabbed with both.” 

3. “It is a lonely feeling when someone you care about becomes a stranger.” 

4. “Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” 

5. “Wicked people never have time for reading. It’s one of the reasons for their wickedness.” 

6. “Do the scary thing first, and get scared later.”

7. “In my case, the only thing that made sense of the world was you, and without you, the world will seem as garbled and tragic as a malfunctioning typewrit9.” 

8. “If we wait until we’re ready, we’ll be waiting for the rest of our lives.” 

9. “Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another.” 

10. “All cannot be lost when there is still so much being found.” 

11. “But I must admit, I miss you terribly. The world is too quiet without you nearby.” 

12. “At times, the world may seem an unfriendly and sinister place, but believe that there is much more good in it than bad. All you have to do is look hard enough, and what might seem to be a series of unfortunate events may, in fact, be the first steps of a journey.” 

13. “People aren’t either wicked or noble. They’re like chef’s salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.” 

14. “All nights are dark days because night is simply a badly lit version of day.” 

15. “Being lonely is okay, and not everyone has to like you. You can’t always rely on people.” 

16. “It had been a long day, and I don’t mind saying that I cried a little bit. There is nothing wrong with crying at the end of a long day.”

17. “All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk.”

18. “It is often difficult to admit that someone you love is not perfect, or to consider aspects of a person that are less than admirable.”

19. “You’ll have to help yourself.”

20. “Sometimes life feels like some dismal story presented as entertainment by some cruel and invisible author. It isn’t a pleasant way to feel, but what choice do we have?”

21. “Perhaps, I should just bury myself and become a diamond after thousands of years of intense pressure.”

22. “Miracles are like meatballs because nobody can exactly agree on what they are made of, where they come from, or how often they should appear.”

23. “There are those who say that life is like a book, with chapters for each event in your life and a limited number of pages on which you can spend your time. But I prefer to think that a book is like a life, particularly a good one, which is well to worth staying up all night to finish.”

24. “Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean that it’s nonsense.”

25. “It is difficult when faced with a situation you cannot control, to admit you can do nothing.”

26. “If everyone fought fire with fire, the whole world would go up in smoke.”

27. “Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does, it can be lost so easily.”

28. “They say in every library there is a single book that can answer the question that burns like a fire in the mind.”

29. “It was a curious feeling, that something could be so close and so distant at the same time.”

30. “Miracles are like pimples because once you start looking for them, you find more than you ever dreamed you’d see.”

31. “When things don’t go right, go left.”

32. “A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.”

33. “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.”

34. “Miracles can happen, even to those who are small, flammable, and dressed all in black.”

35. “When someone is crying, of course, the noble thing to do is to comfort them. But if someone is trying to hide their tears, it may also be noble to pretend you do not notice them.”

36. “Don’t repeat yourself. It’s not only repetitive, it’s redundant, and people have heard it before.”

37. “If you are allergic to a thing, it is best not to put that thing in your mouth, particularly if the thing is cats.”

38. “Just because something is traditional is no reason to do it, of course. Piracy, for example, is a tradition that has been carried on for hundreds of years, but that doesn’t mean we should all attack ships and steal their gold.”

39. “Everything. A letter may be coded, and a word may be coded. A theatrical performance may be coded, and a sonnet may be coded, and there are times when it seems the entire world is in code. Some believe that the world can be decoded by performing research in a library.”

40. “Bad circumstances have a way of ruining things that would otherwise be pleasant.”

41. “Everyone should be able to do one card trick, tell two jokes, and recite three poems, in case they are ever trapped in an elevator.”

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

43. “Sitting with friends, talking about something important is one of the most powerful and necessary forces in the world. It is the way, so many noble organizations begin, with a conversation between associates or even brothers.”

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

45. “Sometimes, the things you’ve lost can be found again in unexpected places.”

46. “Some things in life are difficult to understand, even after years and years of thinking about them while wandering alone through desolate landscapes, usually during the off-season.”

47. “It is one of the peculiar truths of life that people often say things that they know full well are ridiculous.”

48. “Perhaps, the hardest part of life on the lam is that you have to keep moving, often in a direction that seems wrong, dangerous, or an agonizing combination of both.”

49. “Oftentimes, when people are miserable, they will want to make other people miserable, too. But it never helps.”

50. “They didn’t understand it, but like so many unfortunate events in life, just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it isn’t so.”

51. “It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited and that eventually, all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet, it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”

52. “Tears are curious things, for like earthquakes or puppet shows, they can occur at any time, without any warning and without any good reason.”

53. “The phrase ‘in the dark,’ as I’m sure you know, can refer not only to one’s shadowy surroundings but also to the shadowy secrets of which one might be unaware.”

54. “If you are interested in stories with happy endings, then you would be better off somewhere else. In this story, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning, and very few happy things in the middle.”

55. “You don’t spend your life hanging around books without learning a thing or two.”

56. “Sometimes, a story ends before it’s over with unanswered questions, unresolved plots, lingering suspense, blanketing the world like snow, or like smoke from a suspicious fire.”

57. “Temper tantrums, however fun they may be to throw, rarely solve whatever problem is causing them.”

58. “The sad truth is the truth is sad.”

59. “Having a brilliant idea isn’t as easy as turning on a light. But just as a single bulb can illuminate even the most depressing of rooms, the right idea can shed light on a depressing situation.”

60. “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.”

61. “Bravery often demands a price.”

62. “The best way to keep a secret is to tell it to everyone you know, but pretend you are kidding.”

63. “I suppose I’ll have to add the force of gravity to my list of enemies.”

64. “The key to good eavesdropping is not getting caught.”

65. “Grammar is the greatest joy in life, don’t you find?”

66. “Tea should be as bitter as wormwood and as sharp as a two-edged sword kit snicket.”

67. “There are few sights sadder than a ruined book.”

68. “Right, good temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”

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

70. “How can someone so wonderful do something so terrible?”

71. “Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby—awkwardly, and often, with a great deal of mess.”

72. “I will love you as a thief loves a gallery, and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats, and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence, and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong.”

73. “The thing with your heart’s desire is that your heart doesn’t even know what it desires until it turns up.”

74. “I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat, and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms.”

75. “One of the remarkable things about love is that, despite very irritating people writing poems and songs about how pleasant it is, it really is quite pleasant.”

76. “Life never end when you are in it.”

77. “Instead of the word ‘love,’ there was an enormous heart, a symbol sometimes used by people who have trouble figuring out the difference between words and shapes.”

78. “For Beatrice, my love for you shall live forever. You, however, did not.”

79. “When you think of me, she said quietly, think of a food you love very much.”

80. “I will love you until every fire is extinguished and rebuilt from the handsomest and most susceptible of woods. I will love you until the bird hates a nest and the worm hates an apple. I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close. I will love you until your face is fogged by distant memory.”

81. “Summer seems so cold without you. Winter is even colder.”

82. “I’d ruin any day, all my days, for those long nights with you, and I did.”

83. “For Beatrice, our love broke my heart and stopped yours.”

84. “Someone can break your heart, leave you dead on the lawn, and still you never learn what to say to stop it all over again.”

85. “This is love, to sit with someone you’ve known forever in a place you’ve been meaning to go, and watching as their life happens to them until you stand up and it’s time to go.”

86. “If you feel that well-read people are less likely to be evil, and a world full of people sitting quietly with good books in their hands is preferable to world filled with schisms, and sirens, and other noisy and troublesome things, then every time you enter a library you might say to yourself, ‘The world is quiet here,’ as a sort of pledge proclaiming reading to be the greater good.”

87. “It is one of life’s bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting.”

88. “What happens in a certain place can stain your feelings for that location, just as ink can stain a white sheet. You can wash it, and wash it, and still never forget what has transpired—a word which here means ‘happened, and made everybody sad.'”

89. “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.”

90. “The sea is nothing but a library of all the tears in history.”

91. “What is bad news to one person might be good news to someone else, and sometimes, what seems like good news might actually be something full of sadness, misery, and grief.”

92. “When trouble strikes, head to the library. You will either be able to solve the problem or simply have something to read as the world crashes down around you.”

93. “One of the most difficult things to think about in life is one’s regrets. Something will happen to you, and you will do the wrong thing, and for years afterward, you will wish you had done something different.”

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

95. “It is often said that if you have a room with a view, you will feel peaceful and relaxed, but if the room is a caravan hurtling down a steep and twisted road, and the view is an eerie mountain range racing backward away from you, while chilly mountain winds sting your face and toss dust into your eyes, then you will not feel one bit of peace and relaxation.”

96. “There is no worse sound in the world than someone who cannot play the violin but insists on doing so anyway.”

97. “If you have ever lost a friend, you know that it makes your world feel incomplete, like a puzzle with a piece missing, or one half of a broken spyglass.”

98. “Is it useful to feel fear because it prepares you for nasty events, or is it useless because nasty events will occur whether you are frightened or not?”

99. “It was darker than a pitch-black panther, covered in tar, eating black licorice at the very bottom of the deepest part of the black sea.”

100. “There are times to stay put, and what you want will come to you, and there are times to go out into the world and find such a thing for yourself.”

101. “It is always sad when someone leaves home unless they are simply going around the corner and will return in a few minutes with ice-cream sandwiches.”

102. “Trouble and strife can cover this world like the dark of night, or like smoke from a suspicious fire. And when that happens, all good, true, and decent people know that it’s time to volunteer.”

103. “Depressed is a word that often describes somebody who is feeling sad and gloomy, but in this case, it describes a secret button, hidden in a crow statue, that is feeling just fine, thank you.”

104. “As I’m sure you know, whenever you are examining someone else’s belongings, you are bound to learn many interesting things about the person of which you were not previously aware.”

105. “If an optimist had his left arm chewed off by an alligator, he might say in a pleasant and hopeful voice, ‘Well, this isn’t too bad, I don’t have a left arm anymore, but at least nobody will ever ask me if I’m left-handed or right-handed,’ but most of us would say something more along the lines of, ‘Aaaaaa! My arm! My arm!'”

106. “One should never ignore bullies. One should stop them.”

107. “There are times when the entire world seems wrong. The way a reptile room without any reptiles seems wrong. The way a bookshelf without any books seems wrong, or a loved one’s house without the loved one.”

108. “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.”

109. “Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now, and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night’s sleep again, and will spend their lives wandering blearily around a loveless landscape, hoping desperately that their circumstances will improve, but suspecting, in their heart of hearts, that they will remain unloved forever. The best thing to do in these circumstances is to wake somebody else up so that they can feel this way, too.”

110. “Grief, a type of sadness that most often occurs when you have lost someone you love, is a sneaky thing because it can disappear for a long time, and then pop back up when you least expect it.”

111. “Perhaps, if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother’s wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women.”

112. “Taking one’s chances is like taking a bath because sometimes, you end up feeling comfortable and warm, and sometimes, there is something terrible lurking around that you cannot see until it is too late and you can do nothing else but scream and cling to a plastic duck.”

113. “Assumptions are dangerous things to make, and like all dangerous things to make, bombs, for instance, or strawberry shortcake, if you make even the tiniest mistake, you can find yourself in terrible trouble.”

114. “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.”

115. “To hear the phrase ‘our only hope’ always makes one anxious because it means that if the only hope doesn’t work, there is nothing left.”

116. “No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don’t read is often as important as what you do read.”

117. “It is likely I will die next to a pile of things I was meaning to read.”

118. “If writers wrote as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt[bn[ pasdlgkhasdfasdf.”

119. “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.'”

120. “Read about things that wouldn’t keep you up all night long, weeping and tearing out your hair.”

121. “I’m not a stranger. I’m someone who reads the same authors you do.”

122. “Grinning is something you do when you are entertained in some way, such as reading a good book or watching someone you don’t care for spill orange soda all over himself.”

123. “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.”

124. “The three siblings were not born yesterday. Neither were you, 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.”

125. “Of course, it is boring to read about boring thing, but it is better to read something that makes you yawn with boredom than something that will make you weep uncontrollably, pound your fists against the floor, and leave tearstains all over your pillowcase, sheets, and boomerang collection.”

126. “A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded.”

127. “They’re book addicts.”

128. “When you read an enormous number of books, you are going to learn a great deal of information that might not be useful for a long time. But then, suddenly, like a strike of lightning or a grand piano falling out of a window, an opportunity arises to use the information gleaned from even the most unlikely piece of reading.”

129. “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.'”

130. “Literature doesn’t exactly have a strong mental-health track record.”

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

132. “Unless you are a murderer or a taxidermist, it is rare to have actual skeletons in your closet as opposed to metaphorical ones.”

133. “Siblings that say they never fight are most definitely hiding something.”

134. “Unless you have been very, very lucky, you have undoubtedly experienced events in your life that have made you cry. So unless you have been very, very lucky, you know that a good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit.”

135. “If you are baking a pie for your friends, and you read an article entitled ‘How to Build a Chair’ instead of a cookbook, your pie will probably end up tasting like wood and nails instead of like crust and fruity filling.”

136. “This is my knife. It is very sharp and very eager to hurt you.”

137. “It is always cruel to laugh at people, of course, although sometimes if they are wearing an ugly hat, it is hard to control yourself.”

138. “Marriage is like sharing a root beer float or agreeing to be the back half of a horse costume. Even when it’s happening on stage, you should only do it with the people you love.”

139. “Having a personal philosophy is like having a pet marmoset because it may be very attractive when you acquire it, but there may be situations when it will not come in handy at all.”

140. “As I am sure you know when people say ‘It’s my pleasure,’ they usually mean something along the lines of, ‘There’s nothing on Earth I would rather do less.'”

141. “Sometimes words are not enough.”

142. “I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but first impressions are often entirely wrong.”

143. “There are two kinds of fears—rational and irrational, or in simpler terms, fears that make sense and fears that don’t.”

144. “It is so rare in this world to meet a trustworthy person who truly wants to help you, and finding such a person can make you feel warm and safe, even if you are in the middle of a windy valley high up in the mountains.”

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

146. “The way sadness works is one of the strange riddles of the world. If you are stricken with a great sadness, you may feel as if you have been set aflame, not only because of the enormous pain but also because your sadness may spread over your life, like smoke from an enormous fire.”

147. “The burning of a book is a sad, sad sight, for even though a book is nothing but ink and paper, it feels as if the ideas contained in the book are disappearing as the pages turn to ashes and the cover and binding, which is the term for the stitching and glue that holds the pages together, blacken and curl as the flames do their wicked work. When someone is burning a book, they are showing utter contempt for all of the thinking that produced its ideas, all of the labor that went into its words and sentences, and all of the trouble that befell the author.”

148. “If you have ever lost a loved one, then you know exactly how it feels. And if you have not, then you cannot possibly imagine it.”

149. “Happiness is an acquired taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it.”

150. “Even though there are no ways of knowing for sure, there are ways of knowing for pretty sure.”

151. “One can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”

152. “There are some people who believe that home is where one hangs one’s hat, but these people tend to live in closets and on little pegs.”

153. “Nobody knows what an idea will do when it goes off to entertain itself, particularly if the idea comes from a sinister villain.”

154. “Sooner or later, everyone’s story has an unfortunate event or two. The solution, of course, is to stay as far away from the world as possible and lead a safe, simple life.”

155. “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. You might know someone for several years, for instance, and trust him completely as your friend, but circumstances could change, and he could become very hungry, and before you knew it, you could be boiling in a soup pot because there is no way of knowing for sure.”

156. “Arguing with somebody is never pleasant, but sometimes it is useful and necessary to do so.”

157. “Waiting is one of life’s hardships.”

158. “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.”

159. “It is a curious thing, but as one travels the world getting older and older, it appears that happiness is easier to get used to than despair.”

160. “It doesn’t matter if you never see someone again, I told myself. There are millions of people in the world, and most of them never see each other in the first place. You hoped to know Ellington Feint forever, but there’s no such thing as forever, really. Everything is much shorter than that.”

161. “It is very frustrating not to be understood in this world. If you say one thing and keep being told that you mean something else, it can make you want to scream. But somewhere in the world, there is a place for all of us, whether you are an electric form of decoration, peppermint-scented sweet, a source of timber, or a potato pancake.”

162. “Deciding whether or not to trust a person is like deciding whether or not to climb a tree because you might get a wonderful view from the highest branch or you might simply get covered in sap, and for this reason, many people choose to spend their time alone and indoors where it is harder to get a splinter.”

163. “Besides getting several paper cuts in the same day, or receiving the news that someone in your family has you to your enemies, one of the most unpleasant experiences in life is a job interview. It is very nerve-wracking to explain to someone all the things you can do in the hopes that they will pay you to do them.”

164. “It is terribly rude to tell people that their troubles are boring.”

165. “Your initial opinion on just about anything may change over time.”

166. “In a world both frightening and unlucky, there are a few comforts. One of them is making new friends.”

167. “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.”

168. “Entertaining a notion, like entertaining a baby or entertaining a pack of hyenas, is a dangerous thing to refuse to do. If you refuse to entertain a baby cousin, the baby cousin may get bored and entertain itself by wandering off and falling down a well.”

169. “Stealing, of course, is a crime and a very impolite thing to do. But like most impolite things, it is excusable under certain circumstances. Stealing is not excusable if, for instance, you are in a museum and you decide that a certain painting would look better in your house, and you simply grab the painting and take it there. But if you were very, very hungry, and you had no way of obtaining money, it would be excusable to grab the painting, take it to your house, and eat it.”

170. “Every day, the sun goes down over all of these secrets, so everyone is in the dark in one way or another.”

171. “I will love you as we grow older, which has just happened, and has happened again, and happened several days ago, continuously, and then several years before that, and will continue to happen as the spinning hands of every clock and the flipping pages of every calendar mark the passage of time, except for the clocks that people have forgotten to wind and the calendars that people have forgotten to place in a highly visible area.”

172. “I never want to be away from you again, except at work, in the restroom, or when one of us is at a movie the other does not want to see.”

173. “I will love you with no regard to the actions of our enemies or the jealousies of actors. I will love you with no regard to the outrage of certain parents or the boredom of certain friends.”

174. “In love, as in life, one misheard word can be tremendously important. If you tell someone you love them, for instance, you must be absolutely certain that they have replied ‘I love you back,’ and not ‘I love your back’ before you continue the conversation.”

175. “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.”

176. “To Beatrice, my love flew like a butterfly until death swooped down like a bat.”

177. “I will love you if you never marry at all, and never have children, and spend your years wishing you had married me after all, and I must say that on late, cold nights, I prefer this scenario out of all the scenarios I have mentioned. That, Beatrice, is how I will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way.”

178. “Anyone who gives you a cinnamon roll fresh out of the oven is a friend for life.”

179. “I myself fell in love with a wonderful woman who was so charming and intelligent that I trusted that she would be my bride, but there was no way of knowing for sure, and all too soon, circumstances changed, and she ended up marrying someone else, all because of something she read in The Daily Punctilio.”

180. “I will love you if you cut your hair, and I will love you if you cut the hair of others. I will love you if you abandon your baticeering, and I will love you if you retire from the theater to take up some other, less dangerous occupation.”

181. “It has been said that the hardest job in the world is raising a child, but the people who say this have probably never worked at a comb factory or captured pirates on the high seas.”

182. “Today was a very cold and bitter day, as cold and bitter as a cup of hot chocolate if the cup of hot chocolate had vinegar added to it and were placed in a refrigerator for several hours.”

183. “Shyness is a curious thing because, like quicksand, it can strike people at any time, and also, like quicksand, it usually makes its victims look down.”

184. “In my opinion, children should be seen and not heard. I’m an adult, so it follows that I should be heard and not seen. That’s why I work exclusively over the intercom.”

185. “One of the world’s most popular entertainments is a deck of cards, which contains thirteen each of four suits, highlighted by kings, queens, and jacks who are possibly the queen’s younger, more attractive boyfriends.”

186. “It is not very polite to interrupt a person, of course, but sometimes if the person is very unpleasant, you can hardly stop yourself.”

187. “Wishing, like sipping a glass of punch, or pulling aside a bearskin rug in order to access a hidden trapdoor in the floor, is merely a quiet way to spend one’s time before the candles are extinguished on one’s birthday cake.”

188. “You would run much slower if you were dragging something behind you, like a knapsack or a sheriff.”

189. “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.”

190. “It is always tedious when someone tells you that if you don’t stop crying, they will give you something to cry about, because if you are crying, then you already have something to cry about, and so there is no reason for them to give you anything additional to cry about, thank you very much.”

191. “There are some who say that you should forgive everyone, even the people who have disappointed you immeasurably. There are others who say you should not forgive anyone and should stomp off in a huff no matter how many times they apologize. Of these two philosophies, the second one is, of course, much more fun, but it can also grow exhausting to stomp off in a huff every time someone has disappointed you, as everyone disappoints everyone eventually, and one can’t stomp off in a huff every minute of the day.”

192. “There is no point in delaying crying. Sadness is like having a vicious alligator around. You can ignore it for only so long before it begins devouring things, and you have to pay attention.”

193. “It is very unnerving to be proven wrong, particularly when you are really right and the person who is really wrong is proving you wrong and proving himself, wrongly, right.”

194. “A passport, as I’m sure you know, is a document that one shows to government officials whenever one reaches a border between two countries so that the official can learn who you are, where you were born, and how you look when photographed unflatteringly.”

195. “The best strategy for a job interview is to be fairly honest because the worst thing that can happen is that you won’t get the job and will spend the rest of your life foraging for food in the wilderness and seeking shelter underneath a tree or the awning of a bowling alley that has gone out of business.”

196. “It is useless for me to describe to you how terrible Violet, Klaus, and even Sunny felt in the time that followed.”

197. “Who will take care of us out there?” 

198. “Beef. Yes, roast beef. It’s the Swedish term for beef that is roasted.”

199. “Like the hot air mobile home that could travel and survive all by itself.”

200. “A successful villain should have all these things at his or her villainous fingertips, or else give up villainy altogether and try to lead a life of decency, integrity, and kindness, which is much more challenging and noble, if not always quite as exciting.”

201. “This toast feels raw. Is it safe to eat raw toast?”

202. “‘I just don’t understand it,’ said Klaus, which was not something he said very often.”

203. “Can’t we sleep 10 minutes more? I was having a lovely dream about sneezing without covering my mouth and giving everybody germs.”

204. “Just about everything in this world is easier said than done, with the exception of ‘systematically assisting Sisyphus’s stealthy, cyst-susceptible sister,’ which is easier done than said.”

205. “It was confusing pretending to be completely different people, particularly because it had been so long since the Baudelaires were able to be the people they really were. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny did not think of themselves as the sort of children who hid in the trunks of automobiles, or who wore disguises, or who tried to get jobs at the house of freaks.”

206. “The siblings could scarcely remember when they had been able to relax and do the things they liked to do best. It seemed ages since Violet had been able to sit around and think of inventions instead of frantically building something to get them out of trouble.”

207. “It’s a puzzle I’m not sure we can solve.”

208. “Having an aura of menace is like having a pet weasel because you rarely meet someone who has one, and when you do, it makes you want to hide under the coffee table.”

209. “We’ll have to take care of ourselves. We’ll have to be self-sustaining.”