No matter what documents you investigate, and what objects you retrieve, you many never answer the questions that are most important to you, but nevertheless, sooner or later you must finish whatever file you have begun.
I will love you as a cufflink loves to drop from its shirt and explore the party for itself.
Like many people who dress in black, the lump of coal was interested in becoming an artist.
Mr. Poe meant well, but a jar of mustard probably also means well and would do a better job of keeping the Baudelaires out of danger.
In an emergency, one often learns that one’s companions can be of even less help in extraordinary circumstances than they are during an average evening.
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.
You cannot live far from the treachery of the world, because eventually the treachery will wash up on your shores.
There is nothing wrong with crying at the end of a long day.
If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.
It is the things that have a history, L. Compared to them we are ghosts.
Some of the bravest and most resourceful people in the world have come to bad ends.
I confess that if I were in Violet’s place, with only a few minutes to open a locked suitcase, instead of on the deck of my friend Bela’s yacht, writing this down, I probably would have given up hope. I would have sunk to the floor of the bedroom and pounded my fists against the carpet wondering why in the world life was so unfair and filled with inconveniences.
As I’m sure you know, there are two types of “What?” in the world. The first type simply means “Excuse me, I didn’t hear you. Could you please repeat yourself?” The second type is a little trickier. It means something more along the lines of “Excuse me, I did hear you, but I can’t believe that’s really what you meant.
One of the greatest myths in the world–and the phrase “greatest myths” is just a fancy way of saying “big fat lies”–is that troublesome things get less and less troublesome if you do them more and more. The truth is that troublesome things tend to remain troublesome no matter how many times you do them, and that you should avoid doing them unless they are absolutely urgent.
Arguing with somebody is never pleasant, but sometimes it is useful and necessary to do so. Just the other day, for example, it was useful and necessary for me to have an unpleasant argument with a medical student because if he hadn’t let me borrow his speedboat I would now be chained inside a very small waterproof room, instead of sitting in a typewriter factory typing our this woeful tale.
People often forget to look at something right in front of them.
It is good to see people happy with one another. It is a glimpse of a world in which everyone is that way. A happy world might be boring, I told myself, but watching Jake grin at Cleo grinning at Jake grinning at Cleo and back again, I thought it was worth the risk.
Like everyone else, scientists are wrong from time to time, and it is easy to see that they are wrong about the table of the elements. Because although this table contains a great many elements, from the element oxygen, which is found in the air, to the element aluminum, which is found in cans of soda, the table of the elements does not contain one of the most powerful elements that make up our world, and that is the element of surprise.
That, Beatrice, is how I will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way.
But you can’t read every story, and answer every question even if you’d like to.