"Every time you enter a library you might say to yourself, "The world is quiet here," as a sort of pledge proclaiming reading to be the greater good."

"There's nothing wrong with athletics, but they shouldn't get in the way of your schoolwork."

"Why does anyone have a lot of rules? So they can boss people around, I guess."

"Grinning is something you do when you are entertained in some way, such as reading a good book or watching someone you don't care for spill orange soda all over themselves."

"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."

"You might be afraid of the dark, but the dark is not afraid of you. That's why the dark is always close by."

"Yes, I know," Isadora said, and then read her poem, leaning forward so Carmelita Spats would not overhear:"I would rather eat a bowl of vampire batsthan spend an hour with Carmelita Spats."The Baudelaires giggled and then covered their mouths so nobody would know they were laughing at Carmelita."That was great," Klaus said. "I like the part about the bowl of bats."

"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."

"If you ask one question, it will lead you to another, and another. It's like peeling an onion."

"No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don't read is often as important as what you do read."

"Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother's wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women."

"You would run much slower if you were dragging something behind you, like a knapsack or a sheriff."

"I am so tired, I can hardly type these worfs."

"Keep anyone with whom you can read in silence."

"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."

"Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so."

"These three man," Mimi said, "are suspects in a recent theft. Last night, Polly Partial received a shipment of twenty blueberry pies. This morning she counted them and came up short.""How many are missing?" I asked."Last night she had twenty," Harvey said, shutting the station door, "and today she found zero. So at least eighteen are missing.""At least." I agreed."

"A letter may be coded, and a word may be coded. A theatrical performance may be coded, and a sonnet may be coded, and there are times when it seems the entire world is in code. Some believe that the world can be decoded by performing research in a library. Others believe that the world can be decoded by reading a newspaper."

"Reader: Dear Mr. Snicket, What is the best way to keep a secret? Lemony Snicket : Tell it to everyone you know, but pretend you are kidding."

"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."

"Everything happens for a reason."

"The sea is nothing but a library of all the tears in history."

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

"It was another thing you didn't learn at a top-drawer school. Bickering is like baldness or lousy gifts. It runs in families."

"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."

"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."

"There was a bag of coffee beans beneath a harpoon gun and a frozen hunk of spinach, but there was no way to grind the beans into tiny pieces to make coffee. Near a picnic basket and a large bag of mushrooms was a jug of orange juice, but it had been close to one of the bullet holes in the trunk, and so had frozen completely solid in the cold. And after Sunny moved aside three chunks of cold cheese, a large can of water chestnuts, and an eggplant as big as herself, she finally found a small jar of boysenberry jam, and a loaf of bread she could use to make toast, although it was so cold it felt more like a log than a breakfast ingredient."

"There are some things you cannot explain to anyone, even whey they have been explained to you, over and over, almost since the day you were born."

"A secret note is secret. There is no reason to sign it."

"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."

"The map is not the territory," Snicket's chaperon advises him. "That's an expression which means the world does not match the picture in our heads."

"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."

"Friends can make you feel that the world is smaller and less sneaky than it really is, because you know people who have similar experiences."

"Just because something is traditional is no reason to do it, of course. Piracy, for example, is a tradition that has been carried on for hundreds of years, but that doesn't mean we should all attack ships and steal their gold."

"What a schmuck!"

"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."

"O, great wise man,' she said, 'I have been wondering so many things. Is life more than sitting at home doing the same thing over and over? Wise man, is life more than watching one's relatives do unpleasant things, or more than grim tasks one must perform at school and at work? Is life more than being entertained by literature, wise man, or more than traveling from one place to another, suffering from poor emotional health and pondering the people one loves? And what about those who lead a life of mystery? And the mysteries of life? And, wise man, what about the overall feeling of doom that one cannot ever escape no matter what one does, and miscellaneous things that I have neglected to mention in specific?"

"It is always better to ask a question than to answer one."

"A long time ago, there was no such thing as school, and children spent their days learning a trade, a phrase which here means "standing around doing tedious tasks under the instruction of a bossy adult." In time, however, people realized that the children could be allowed to sit, and the first school was invented."

"When you find the sort of people who will show up to give you a ride exactly when they've promised to do so, hold on to them for dear life."

"This is an absurd moral, for you and I both know that sometimes not only is it good to lie, it is necessary to lie."

"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."

"But the sad truth is that the truth is sad, and what you want does not matter."

"I like a story that could never happen to me. If I want real life I'll read a newspaper."

"There is nothing particularly wrong with salmon, of course, but like caramel candy, strawberry yogurt, or liquid carpet cleaner, if you eat too much of it you are not going to enjoy your meal."

"Count Olaf sounds like an awful person. I hope he is torn apart by wild animals someday. Wouldn't that be satisfying?"

"Miracles are like pimples, because once you start looking for them you find more than you ever dreamed you'd see."

"I don't know why wicked places generally look wicked. You'd think they'd look nice, to fool people, but they hardly ever do."

"This is my knife. It is very sharp and very eager to hurt you."