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"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."
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"Your moral foundation and character currently depend on what you hear."

"To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed."

"Life wants you to know that feelings are more important than facts, and you should never hurt someone just to be right."

"Ethics are the things that say, 'Don't stick your finger in the socket.' The world says, 'It's okay because we've shut off the electricity.' And at the point that we've chosen to listen to the world and ignore our ethics, we say, 'I'm having a really hard time getting back up."

"I was brought up to be honest; the trouble is it gets me nowhere." Liking her better, he smiled and said, "It'll get us to heaven." "Will it?" "If heaven existed." "Do you not believe in heaven, Mr. Fielding, may I ask?" she said, looking at him shyly. "I do not. Yet I believe that honesty gets us there."

"Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?"
Explore more quotes by Lemony Snicket


"A new experience can be extremely pleasurable, or extremely irritating, or somewhere in between, and you never know until you try it out."


"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."


"I stood in the corridor feeling like an angry pebble. It didn't matter where I rolled off to. The mystery and treachery of the world continued, and a pebble like me could get angry over anything it liked and it wouldn't do any good. Librarians not reading, I thought to myself. Sometimes I don't know why I bother."


"I'm jealous of your hooks," Kevin replied. "Having no hands is better than having two equally strong hands."Don't be ridiculous," one of the white-faced women replied. "Having a white face is worse than both of your situations."But you have a white face because you put makeup on," Colette said, as Sunny climbed back out of the trunk and knelt down in the snow. "You're putting powder on your face right now."


"It was a puzzle, a dark and lonely one, and if I were a piece in this puzzle, I did not know where it belonged. I needed to put myself aside, just for a little while, until I saw where I might fit in."


"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."


"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."


"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."
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