"Anyone who knew Violet well could tell she was thinking hard, because her long hair was tied up in a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes. Violet had a real knack for inventing and building strange devices, so her brain was often filled with images of pulleys, levers, and gears, and she never wanted to be distracted by something as trivial as her hair."

"If an optimist had his left arm chewed off by an alligator, he might say in a pleasant and hopeful voice, "Well this isn't too bad, I don't have a left arm anymore but at least nobody will ever ask me if I'm left-handed or right-handed," but most of us would say something more along the lines of, "Aaaaaa! My arm! My arm!"

"The world is too quiet without you nearby."

"Are you ready?" Klaus asked finally."No," Sunny answered."Me neither," Violet said, "but if we wait until we're ready we'll be waiting for the rest of our lives, Let's go."

"The real Santa Claus is at the mall."

"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."

"Oftentimes. when people are miserable, they will want to make other people miserable, too. But it never helps."

"Sometimes, just saying that you hate something, and having someone agree with you, can make you feel better about a terrible situation."

"With a library it is easier to hope for serendipity than to look for a precise answer."

"Like many people who dress in black, the lump of coal was interested in becoming an artist."

"It is almost as if happiness is an acquired taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it."

"I am heartbroken, but I have been heartbroken before, and this might be the best for which I can hope."

"We both wanted to know each other's secrets, and we both wanted the other person to go first."

"If you were smart," Genghis said, "you would have borrowed the silverware of one of your friends.""We never thought of that," Klaus said. When one is forced to tell atrocious lies, one often feels a guilty flutter in one's stomach, and Klaus felt such a flutter now. "You certainly are an intelligent man.""Not only am I intelligent," Genghis agreed, "but I'm also very smart."

"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."

"Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them."

"All cannot be lost when there is still so much being found."

"But some secrets are so strange and so dangerous that showing them to people makes the strangeness and the danger pour into their lives like a dark, dark ink."

"If you were upset about an ugly pimple on the end of your nose, you might try to feel better by keeping your pimple in perspective. You might compare your pimple situation to that of someone who was being eaten by a bear, and when you looked in the mirror at your ugly pimple, you could say to yourself, 'Well, at least I'm not being eaten by a bear."

"People who think nothing can go wrong are usually disappointed."

"We represent the true human condition, the one permanent victory over cruelty and chaos. . . . Our true home is the imagination, and our kingdom is the wide-open world."

"That night was a dark day. Of course, all nights are dark days, because night is simply a badly lit version of day, ..."

"What do your parents know, about surviving?"

"Instead of the word 'love' there was an enormous heart, a symbol sometimes used by people who have trouble figuring out the difference between words and shapes."

"Sunny did not eat the wood, of course, but she chewed on it and pretended it was a carrot, or an apple, or a beef and cheese enchilada, all of which she loved."

"Thinking about something is like picking up a stone when taking a walk, either while skipping rocks on the beach, for example, or looking for a way to shatter the glass doors of a museum. When you think about something, it adds a bit of weight to your walk, and as you think about more and more things you are liable to feel heavier and heavier, until you are so burdened you cannot take any further steps, and can only sit and stare at the gentle movements of the ocean waves or security guards, thinking too hard bout too many things to do anything else."

"Nothing firms up a friendship like a good-natured argument."

"The expression 'Those who can't do, teach' is a curious one, because if you look at the world , you'll see that teachers aren't particularly worse at doing things than anyone else, so perhaps the expression might be better worded as 'nobody can do anything."

"Ellington Feint was a line in my mind running right down the middle of my life, separating the formal training of my childhood and the territory of the rest of my days. She was an axis, and at that moment and for many moments afterward, my entire world revolved around her."

"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."

"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."

"I think everyone's parents have secrets. You just have to know where to look for them."

"I suppose I'll have to add the force of gravity to my list of enemies."

"Simply put, dramatic irony is when a person makes a harmless remark, and someone else who hears it knows something that makes the remark have a different, and usually unpleasant, meaning. For instance, if you were in a restaurant and said out loud, "I can't wait to eat the veal marsala I ordered," and there were people around who knew that the veal marsala was poisoned and that you would die as soon as you took a bite, your situation would be one of dramatic irony."

"To hear the phrase "our only hope" always makes one anxious, because it means that if the only hope doesn't work, there is nothing left."

"Just about everything in this world is easier said than done, with the exception of "systematically assisting Sisyphus's stealthy, cyst-susceptible sister," which is easier done than said."

"Wishing, like sipping a glass of punch, or pulling aside a bearskin rug in order to access a hidden trapdoor in the floor, is merely a quiet way to spend one's time before the candles are extinguished on one's birthday cake."

"There are two kinds of fears: rational and irrational- or in simpler terms, fears that make sense and fears that don't."

"Klaus sighed, and opened a book, and as at so many other times when the middle Baudelaire child did not want to think about his circumstances, he began to read."

"Though he was not as dastardly as Esmé or Count Olaf or the hook-handed man, Jerome was still an ersatz guardian, because a real guardian is supposed to provide a home, with a place to sleep and something to wear, and all Jerome had given them in the end was 'Good luck.' Jerome reached the end of the block and turned left, and the Baudelaires were once again alone in the world."

"If you're not scared, she told me, it's not bravery."

"One of the world's most tiresome questions is what object one would bring to a desert island,because people always answer "a deck of cards" or "Anna Karenina" when the obvious answer is "a well equipped boat and a crew to sail me off the island and back home where I can play all the card games and read all the Russian novels I want."

"Some people think destiny is something you cannot escape, such as death or a curdled cheesecake, both of which always turn up sooner or later."

"One could say, in fact, that no story really has a beginning, and that no story really has an end, as all of the world's stories are as jumbled as the items in the arboretum, with their details and secrets all heaped together so that the whole story, from beginning to end, depends on how you look at it."

"It is difficult, when faced with a situation you cannot control, to admit you can do nothing."

"The book did not say anything about a statue, valuable or otherwise, and so I stopped reading about the Bombinating Beast and got interested in the chapter about the Stain'd witches, who had ink instead of blood in their veins. I wondered what they kept in their pens."

"He looked like the sort of person who would tell you that he did not have an umbrella to lend you when he actually had several and simply wanted to see you get soaked."

"A passport, as I'm sure you know, is a document that one shows to government officials whenever one reaches a border between two countries, so that the official can learn who you are, where you were born, and how you look when photographed unflatteringly."

"Everyone tells you it's all right to cry, but not enough people say it's all right if you don't want people to know."

"Criminals should be punished, not fed pastries."