Top 100 Daniel Handler Quotes
#1. I like writing for movies. It's nice to be alone working on fiction in your room, and then it's nice to be in a room with a bunch of people working on a movie.
Daniel Handler
#2. One narrative, about the hated people in our lands, is that eventually they get what is coming to them.
Daniel Handler
#3. This is complicated," you said, back on the napkin, and then looked at me. You wanted to pry me open, I could see it, drag me across our boundaries so we could feast together in secret from the rest of the world. "But," you said, "no, not but. I love you.
Daniel Handler
#4. I think one of the reasons it ended was that his eyes never lit up for me the way they did for classical music. I realize that in the long run I may not be as wonderful as a Brahms symphony but I think I'm good for a Haydn quintet.
Daniel Handler
#7. You see failed vocabulary in the adult world so often, and it's often because once you reach a certain age you're kind of embarrassed to go look up a word if you don't know what it means.
Daniel Handler
#8. I opened my mouth and kissed you then, the first time all night, attacked you and surrendered completely, and let's get out of here. I'm ready, I'm finished, let's not break up, no, no. Take me home, my boyfriend, my love.
Daniel Handler
#9. I guess it's funny how life turns out?" she tried. "Not last I checked," Errol said with a snort.
Daniel Handler
#10. The right boys I always toss and the wrong ones I keep on top of me like paperweights.
Daniel Handler
#11. I didn't like books where people played on a sports team and won a bunch of games, or went to summer camp and had a wonderful time. I really liked a book where a witch might cut a child's head off or a pack of angry dogs might burst through a door and terrorize a family.
Daniel Handler
#12. Come on in, I said again, and he came on in and I hugged him. I felt his arms, warm through the linen. Suddenly there was a reason to leave the house and see other humans, because some of them were good.
Daniel Handler
#13. Dark, light, dark, light, dark-I swung and missed.
Daniel Handler
#14. When you're at sea," Gwen would probably reply, "it's not food. It's fuel, for further exploits."
"So the exploit fuels the next exploit, and the next the next, and so on? Is there nothing more, nothing else?"
"Is there ever?
Daniel Handler
#15. I was so grateful that Lemony Snicket wasn't the worst movie ever made that I overlooked many things that might have otherwise upset me.
Daniel Handler
#16. Love makes the world go round, the hit songs collectively tell us, and the world is full of people you don't know and might as well be nice to because they won't leave.
Daniel Handler
#17. I'm not very good at the accordion. If I played guitar, I wouldn't be on anyone's album. But because I play the accordion and no one else does, I end up doing strange things.
Daniel Handler
#18. I like to think that I get better and better as a writer, but it seems pretty easy to me to slip on disguises of various people.
Daniel Handler
#19. 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.
Daniel Handler
#20. 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.
Daniel Handler
#21. We steal the happiness of others in order to be happy ourselves, and when it is stolen from us we voyage desperately to steal it back.
Daniel Handler
#22. It's one thing for forgive yourself a mistake. But if you knew it was a mistake at the time, how do you forgive yourself then?
Daniel Handler
#23. When do you learn that the world, like any diner worth its salt, is open twenty-four hours a day?
Daniel Handler
#24. Do you do them in that old-fashioned code,like daffodils mean I'm sorry I was late, daisies mean sorry I embarrassed you in front of your friends, these things here fanned out mean just thinking of you?Or did you just have them throw whatever was pretty together?
Daniel Handler
#25. It was like an apple running for Congress, a bike rack wearing a bathing suit.
Daniel Handler
#26. I was so angry I knew it would boomerang someplace sometime soon.
Daniel Handler
#27. Love is candy from a stranger, but it's candy you've had before and it probably won't kill you.
Daniel Handler
#28. I couldn't wait to see then again, beautiful things. Extraordinary.
Daniel Handler
#29. I kind of always think my work is unfilmable, and when I meet people who are interested in filming it, I'm always stunned.
Daniel Handler
#31. I think pirates, like astronauts, particularly for a boy, are always kind of worth thinking about.
Daniel Handler
#32. Every last souvenir of the love we had, the prizes & the debris of this relationship, like the glitter in the gutter when the parade has passed, all the everything & whatnot kicked to the curb.
Daniel Handler
#34. I think if I were walking someplace and I saw a corpse my brain would tell me it was a million things before I believed it was a corpse.
Daniel Handler
#35. 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.
Daniel Handler
#36. The flames rose bright on everyone's screens, flickering lipstick red and traffic-cone orange and Lord knows what else, depending on how your television's colour was.
Daniel Handler
#37. You can't mind these things, you just can't, for to dislike what makes a person human is to dislike all humans.
Daniel Handler
#38. There is only laughing across the land as the car moves you along, on your way someplace with love in the car.
Daniel Handler
#39. It was a secret time and place, you next to me, untraceable and out of this world.
Daniel Handler
#40. My general writing preface is to write an outline and then ignore about half of it, both on a micro level with the individual book, and on a macro level with the series as a whole, and that's pretty much what's happened.
Daniel Handler
#41. 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
#42. Everything else has vanished, so you take them now. Maybe if you're the one keeping them, I'll be the one feeling better.
Daniel Handler
#43. I think there are probably just as many adults who would miss the humor of my books, if not more, as there are children.
Daniel Handler
#44. This world is suchier than we are, and the best thing to do is keep moving and find your keys.
Daniel Handler
#45. It's why we broke up, Ed, a small thing that's disappeared or maybe was never really in my hands in the first place.
Daniel Handler
#46. She spun the car through a right turn that would have killed us all had we been minor characters.
Daniel Handler
#47. Every time you said it, you really said it. It wasn't like a sequel where Hollywood just lines up the same actors and hopes it works again. It was like a remake with a new director and crew trying something else and starting from scratch.
Daniel Handler
#49. The whole thing of what I've been trying," you said, "is that you're different, and you keep asking about the other girls, but what I mean is that I don't think about them, because of the way you are.
Daniel Handler
#50. I started making plans, thinking we would get that far.
Daniel Handler
#51. I can't imagine why you would want to take your child to see what the career of a writer is like, because it mostly consists of sitting in a room typing, or going to the library and looking something up. Those are not exciting things to watch.
Daniel Handler
#52. And love, who can say the way it winds.. like a serpent in the garden of our untroubled minds
Daniel Handler
#53. 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
#54. It is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes; it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe.
Daniel Handler
#56. For Beatrice, I cherished, you perished, The world's been nightmarished.
Daniel Handler
#57. You're a ghost! Eddie cried. You're empty and you have nothing inside you.
Daniel Handler
#58. The thing with your heart's desire is that your heart doesn't even know what it desires until it turns up.
Daniel Handler
#59. Wherever there's a conductor, you're sure to find a dead composer!
Daniel Handler
#60. Stop saying no offense," I said, "when you say offensive things. It's not a free pass.
Daniel Handler
#61. The street was a yellow streak, however many yards wide, cabs and cabs and cabs and the occasional car that wasn't a cab so the whole thing looked like a scarcely-been-touched ear of corn.
Daniel Handler
#62. The trouble with talking about irony is, it's such a slippery thing that the second you start talking about it, you're a better example of it than you are an analyst.
Daniel Handler
#63. To Beatrice- My love flew like a butterfly Until death swooped down like a bat As the poet Emma Montana McElroy said: 'That's the end of that
Daniel Handler
#64. But there was more, as there always is when the love goes. She was haunted, naturally. Otherwise what is the point, why leave your rickety house, and why this yo-yo world giving us things and yanking them back?
Daniel Handler
#66. We are a nation of children letting horrible things happen, and flunking Calc.
Daniel Handler
#67. Once more, this is love: it rings and you open up unless it looks like an ax murderer.
Daniel Handler
#68. I do think of emotions as being on a circular path, so you can feel terrible and terrible and terrible, and then all of a sudden it becomes quite funny.
Daniel Handler
#69. Love can smack you like a seagull, and pour all over your feet like junk mail.
Daniel Handler
#70. I never told you that, even after telling you I love you, all those times all that day, I never told you how beautiful it was then, like everyone was telling us not to be.
Daniel Handler
#71. They say that when you're really in love, the world becomes gossamer and gorgeous, but in my experience the world gets grimy, and the love object is in stark relief from the surroundings. This is love, a pretty thing on an ugly street.
Daniel Handler
#72. Either you have the feeling or you don't. Hawk Davies
Daniel Handler
#73. We laughed the rest of the way, because the point of this story is, it is not the cookies. It is the love.
Daniel Handler
#74. Lately it has become more and more difficult to attend dinner parties without the evening ending in gunfire or tapioca ...
Daniel Handler
#75. There were a million things, everything, I didn't know. I was stupid, the official descriptive phrase for happy. I took this thing I'm giving you back, this thing you gave me as the star we were waiting for finally emerged.
Daniel Handler
#76. 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.
Daniel Handler
#78. That night it felt that somehow by flicking them off the roof, the matches would burn down everything, the sparks from the tips of the flames, torching the world and all the heartbroken people in it.
Daniel Handler
#79. 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.
Daniel Handler
#80. I'd ruin any day, all my days, for those long nights with you, and I did.
Daniel Handler
#81. For every teenager I know, having a phone is a mixed blessing, because your parents can press a button and figure out where you are.
Daniel Handler
#82. Put your hair up, Min. The secret ingredient is not your hair.
Daniel Handler
#83. I looked for a scrape in my reflection and then, meeting my own eyes, stood for a sec and tried to figure, like all girls in all mirrors everywhere, the difference between lover and slut.
Daniel Handler
#84. How confusing. Could it be that our narrator is unreliable? No such chance. Mind like a steel trap, I have.
Daniel Handler
#85. I wore it, this careless thing you don't even remember giving to me from your bag. It wasn't a gift, this thing I'm returning. It was barely a gesture, almost forgotten already, this thing I wore like it was dear to me. And it was. No wonder we broke up.
Daniel Handler
#86. A girl meets a boy, Ed, and everything changes, or so she says.
Daniel Handler
#87. Who would dare think that, forever? Some idiot girl who wouldn't know how things played out.
Daniel Handler
#88. I found powerful the idea that everything we have is, in effect, stolen from everybody else.
Daniel Handler
#89. Sometimes words are not enough. There are some circumstances so utterly wretched that I cannot describe them in sentences or paragraphs or even a whole series of books.
Daniel Handler
#90. You don't say, Helena said. She took a cigarette out of her ripped purse and lit it because she smoked. She was a smoker.
Daniel Handler
#91. People worry more about girls, for a good reason: I don't think my parents thought I was going to be raped by a classmate or attacked when I was walking alone in some neighborhood. So it's not just paranoid parents.
Daniel Handler
#92. If I were to say, "Yes, I am a fascinating, erudite person," what would that say about me? I don't know.
Daniel Handler
#93. When I think about sex, you know, I want it to feel good. Not feel good, shut up, but right. Happy, not just banging away somewhere. You know, you should not just do it to do it. You should love the guy.
Daniel Handler
#94. Why haven't we fixed sick yet? You scientists there
put down those starfish and HELP us. I hereby demand that all the people who are good at math make the world free of illness. The rest of us will write you epic poems and staple them together into a booklet.
Daniel Handler
#95. She had the look in her eye when you kick and kick at the door and it doesn't open, when you write a boy letters and letters and he never loves you, not 'til the day he dies. Not even then.
Daniel Handler
#96. I love you so soundly and I will do anything to drag you forward.
Daniel Handler
#97. Is it OK not to be a virgin, yes. Most people aren't virgins, Min. That's why there's people to begin with.
Daniel Handler
#98. Phil Needle supposed what he meant was that he wanted to be God, just long enough to find his daughter. It was not a prayer but a promotion. This was why nobody liked God: they wanted his job.
Daniel Handler
#99. 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
#100. To stutter through it with you or even stop stuttering and say nothing, was so lucky and soft, better talk than mile-a-minute with anyone. After a few minutes we'd stop rattling, we'd adjust, we'd settle in, and the conversation would speed into the night.
Daniel Handler
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