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.
You cannot wait for an untroubled world to have an untroubled moment.
In any case, this is how all our stories begin, in darkness with our eyes closed, and all our stories end the same way, too, with all of us uttering some last words – or perhaps someone else’s – before slipping back into darkness as our series of unfortunate events comes to an end.
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.
Josephine caught my eye and gave me a signal we’d used for years to indicate that one of us had to leave. The signal was mouthing the words “I have to leave” and pointing at the door.
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.
They were probably hitting the town. I hoped it was hitting them back.
Life is a conundrum of esoterica.
Perhaps I should just bury myself and become a diamond after thousands of years of intense pressure.
I have a long list of things I’d rather not do.
The trouble with being patient is that eventually you get tired of it.
Everybody will die, of course, sooner or later. Circus performers will die, and clarinet experts will die, and you and I will die, and there might be a person who lives on your block, right now, who is not looking both ways before he crosses the street and who will die in just in a few seconds, all because of a bus. Everybody will die, but very few people want to be reminded of that fact.
Villainy can win against one library, but not against an organization of readers.
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.
It is unwise to make something permanent when the whole world is shifting. There may be a time when this symbol means something treacherous and terrible, rather than something noble and literate.
The word “haunted”, I’m sure you know, usually applies to a house, graveyard, or supermarket that has ghosts living in it, but the word can also be used to describe people who have seen and heard such horrible things that they feel as if ghosts are inside them, haunting their brains and hearts with misery and despair.
A great man once said that right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
If you are interested in happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not very many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters.
It is hard for decent people to stay angry at someone who has burst into tears, which is why it is often a good idea to burst into tears if a decent person is yelling at you.
Tragedies are stories that usually begin fairly happily and then steadily go downhill, until all of the characters are dead, wounded, or otherwise inconvenienced.