Daniel Handler

I write longhand on legal pads, about half at home and half in cafes. I drink a lot of water and eat a lot of raw carrots.

— Daniel Handler

I write every day weekdays for about 5 hours, mostly longhand on legal pads. It has gotten neither harder nor easier, sadly or happily.

— Daniel Handler

This is how it is in life and love. In life and love we are with people for a while, and then we join other people, people we have not met, and we walk with them, and we leave behind all the things we used to be. Sometimes we leave people behind too... This happens everyday. Everyday this happens and scarcely anybody cares.

— Daniel Handler

For Beatrice--When we were together I felt breathless. Now, you are.-Lemony Snicket

— Daniel Handler

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

— Daniel Handler

Dear Dairy,

— Daniel Handler

I didn't realize this was a sad occasion. — Waiter at The Anxious Clown Restaurant

— Daniel Handler

People aren't either wicked or noble," the hook-handed man said. They're like chef's salad, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.

— Daniel Handler

C is for CuteA is for "A tap dancing ballerina fairy princess veterinarian! NOW LET'S START MY WHOLE WONDERFUL SONG ALL OVER AGAIN!

— Daniel Handler

Lemony Snicket: (narrating) But the three siblings were not born yesterday. Violet was born more than fifteen years before this particular Wednesday, and Klaus was born approximately two years after that, and even Sunny, who had just passed out of babyhood, was 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.

— Daniel Handler

I will love you no matter how many mistakes I make when trying to reduce fractions, and no matter how difficult it is to memorize the periodic table.

— Daniel Handler

I will love you as the manatee loves the head of lettuce and as the dark spot loves the leopard, as the leech loves the ankle of a wader and as a corpse loves the beak of the vulture.

— Daniel Handler

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.

— Daniel Handler

Love was in the air so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner.

— Daniel Handler

The world gets grimy and the love object is in stark relief from its surroundings. This is love, a pretty thing on an ugly street and why wouldn't you pick it up if it appeared in a taxi cab.

— Daniel Handler

I'm frightened by your behaviour. I woke up this morning and you said good morning and i said good morning, what do you feel like doing today, and you said well i sort of have to do this thing, and i said what thing and you said go to the reading of my father's will, and I said what are you talking about and then you told me that your dad had died. THIS MORNING.

— Daniel Handler

If i were a little braver i would have asked her something like, "Do you think Kickass: the movie is a comedy in the traditional, classical sense?" and we could have that conversation and it would lead to other conversations during the flat and lonely times.

— Daniel Handler

Standing ten feet away from Lila was sort of kickass with her nails drumming on the box with the slot in, where we put everything that we rip in half, and with her blue-eyed beauty and with the gum she was chewing and how lovely she was, in that way that makes you want to find something else lovely just so you can give it to her and see how really kickass it is to have to lovely things next to each other.

— Daniel Handler

Keith has one of those all terrain things that will come in so handy when the world ends and we need a nine-thousand -cylinder engine to drive over those hordes of blood-thirsty mutants crawling all over the video-game landscape.

— Daniel Handler

This world is suchier than we are, and the best thing to do is keep moving and find your keys.

— Daniel Handler

Money money money money money money money money money. Let no one say it has no place in a love story. It has a particular place. It is something on the right shelf.

— Daniel Handler

This is love, moving to where the money is, and all the while a volcano or an ex-girlfriend might blow the whole thing to hell, as the Americans say. As everybody says.

— Daniel Handler

… the point is, why is there cruelty? Why do people ask other people to do impossible things? why behave this way? why is there mean, when there are better things than mean, love particularly?

— Daniel Handler

"I love you, too" David said and took the bottle."I want you to love me in particular," Helena said

— Daniel Handler

It's always dawnest before dark

— Daniel Handler

I'm full of hard times today

— Daniel Handler

The right boys I always toss and the wrong ones I keep on top of me like paperweights.

— Daniel Handler

What a bad day it was, the clouds were low and cloudy, the rain no fun, and the dark as it hit the late afternoon thick like someone who stops by your place and just won't leave. The day was canceled, almost, on account of the rain spilling itself over everything.

— Daniel Handler

This was that day if you know what I mean.

— Daniel Handler

It was a bad day for love.

— Daniel Handler

The rain, the rain, the rain. You can't even hear it outside the window but still it's a sad thing. Rain, the grade school teachers say, makes the trees and flowers grow, but we're not trees and flower, and so many grade school teachers are single.

— Daniel Handler

She said, "We're detectives" in the tone of voice that someone might say, "Making you happy isn't making me happy"

— Daniel Handler

They could not love anymore, they thought, just drink and pour coffee and track people down in the rain. They were living frigidly, as if in a cone of frost.

— Daniel Handler

Love can smack you like a seagull, and pour all over your feet like junkmail. You can't be ready for such a thing any more than salt water taffy gets you ready for the ocean.

— Daniel Handler

Mike could see the fellow cooked and ate and sat on a sofa and put his feet up on the table it magazines. Mike didn't care which ones the fellow subscribed to, because Mike had subscribed to the fellow.

— Daniel Handler

This is love, and the trouble with it: it can make you embarrassed. Love is really liking someone a whole lot and not wanting to screw that up. Everybody's chewed over this. This unites us, this part of love.

— Daniel Handler

I find you interesting, Joe, so nearly everything you say will be interesting too. I love you. I could say I'm lonely but that's not the only reason.

— Daniel Handler

I'm not - the terrific guy you keep telling me about. I'm not made of sugar and spice and everything nice. I'm made of rats and snails and puppy-dogs tails. I lie sometimes. I have broken people's hearts. I'm looking for love, I'll admit that, but now that it's here in abundance, I'm afraid of commitment and I want you, please, to leave me.

— Daniel Handler

[she] gave me a puzzled frown like she thought offhand i was dead but the media's so unreliable these days.

— Daniel Handler

That's always where the love goes, with somebody else away from me.

— Daniel Handler

All four of them have completely abandoned one another.

— Daniel Handler

Adam hates Tomas and tried to get Eddie to join him in hate. It hasn't worked, although Eddie will admit certain shortcomings, and the two men have not met until now, in the forest, when Adam has decided that Tomas in Eddie's stories and the Tomas in this story are the same man.

— Daniel Handler

It was the sort of day when people walk in the park and solve problems. "We'll simply call the taxi company, David, and request a large one, like one of those vans." Is the sort of thing you would overhear if you were overhearing in the park.

— Daniel Handler

Dear Joe The letter said The windows rattle without you, you bastard. The trees are the cause, rattling in the wind, you jerk, the wild scraping those leaves and twigs against my window. They'll keep on doing this, you terrible husband, and slowly wear away our entire apartment.

— Daniel Handler

Yeah, I have a question," said the guy with the wicked eyes... "My question is, I quit. I'm going to quit.

— Daniel Handler

What he'd just said was "Who cares?" and nobody wants to hear that.

— Daniel Handler

South San Francisco The Industrial City is ugly as sin but somebody lives there: Allison, in fact.

— Daniel Handler

He's been misled and he's been afraid. He's been hit in the head and left for dead. He's been abused and he's been accused and he's been refused a piece of bread. On and on he goes down this road getting pushed around and lost and around and given until sundown to get out of town, and yet this is basically a love song. He's had the shit kicked out of him, and guess what? It's love.

— Daniel Handler

When I was crazy." the radio explained, "I thought you were great.

— Daniel Handler

Allison squinted at the strange, catastrophic sky, and took another step, another step, another step, because in the future - she could see it - this would not be happening.

— Daniel Handler

"I know" Helena said and this is another example of why behave this way? Things just poured out of her mouth lately, like vomit, and sometimes it actually was.

— Daniel Handler

They are all one, the mothers of us all, like the money you spent. Imagine the vanish of weight if the advice of your mother never existed. They tell us things, unless we have no mothers and either way things turn out such that nothing you've ever heard is ever any help.

— Daniel Handler

"Instead of change, please give me gun so i can shoot you." She is soft-spoken but short and full of rage lately, like her whole life.

— Daniel Handler

He bought a bird in its own cage, with a sheet over it so no one could see the bird and the bird couldn't see anyone, and the whole thing was a secret bird... Everything he said was tinged with the unreadability of someone who would bring a bird on cruise ship.

— Daniel Handler

"Oh my god!" Hillary is standing in the doorway of the bathroom of the bathroom which on one had is surprising but there's the other hand, too.

— Daniel Handler

"Help me," Allison says, but she is soft-spoken, and everyone she loves is so far away.

— Daniel Handler

Over the years they had developed a layer of sincerity over the irony over the sincerity. It was an irony sandwich, then, which tasted mostly like sincerity, like a cheap, bad sandwich.

— Daniel Handler

Wedding after wedding after wedding and then yours - your wedding? Would that make you what they're now calling happy?

— Daniel Handler

God, or somebody, what is it with terrible things? If you made this world why not a better one?

— Daniel Handler

judgmentally, judgmentally, judgmentally I would believe in you and sword fight others who did not, any necessary sacrifice if you were in the mood for that.

— Daniel Handler

They say love's like a bus, and if you wait long enough another one will come along, but not in this place where the buses are slow and most of the cute ones are gay.

— Daniel Handler

Halloween seems to last forever, until it is finally time to put on one's costume and demand candy from strangers.

— Daniel Handler

I like to give people novels I think they would like, on no particular occasion - just when we're in a bookstore together. I like to receive reference books on my birthday.

— Daniel Handler

I write longhand on legal pads, about half at home and half in cafes. I drink a lot of water and eat a lot of raw carrots.

— Daniel Handler

I write every day weekdays for about 5 hours, mostly longhand on legal pads. It has gotten neither harder nor easier, sadly or happily.

— Daniel Handler