849 Quotes by Lemony Snicket

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.

I give up,” Mr. Poe said, and coughed into his handkerchief. “Five hundred is too much to pay for a big herring statue.

Miracles are like meatballs, because nobody can exactly agree on what they are made of, where they come from, or how often they should appear.

Deciding on a safe answer to a question is like deciding on a safe ingredient in a sandwich, because if you make the wrong decisions you may find that something horrible is coming out of your mouth.

Where are the books? All these elegant bookshelves are empty.

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 first sentence was “This tome will endeavor to scrutinize, in quasi-inclusive breadth, the epistemology of ophthalmologically contrived appraisals of ocular systems and the subsequent and requisite exertions imperative for expugnation of injurious states,” and as Violet read it out loud to her sister, both children felt the dread that comes when you begin a very boring and difficult book.

The expression “following suit” is a curious one, because it has nothing to do with walking behind a matching set of clothing.

There is a popular game in which one person says something to another, and that person says it to another, and so on and so on, and all the while the message is getting more and more garbled until it is nonsense. The game is called “living in the world” and has been played for thousands of years.