Lemony Snicket · 324 pages
Rating: (12.7K votes)
“If you like books with happy endings then put this book down immediately.”
― Lemony Snicket, quote from A Series of Unfortunate Events Box: The Complete Wreck
“Deciding on the right thing to do in a situation is a bit like deciding on the right thing to wear to a party. It is easy to decide on what is wrong to wear to a party, such as deep-sea diving equipment or a pair of large pillows, but deciding what is right is much trickier. It might seem right to wear a navy blue suit, for instance, but when you arrive there could be several other people wearing the same thing, and you could end up being handcuffed due to a case of mistaken identity. It might seem right to wear your favorite pair of shoes, but there could be a sudden flood at the party, and your shoes would be ruined. And it might seem right to wear a suit of armor to the party, but there could be several other people wearing the same thing, and you could end up being caught in a flood due to a case of mistaken identity, and find yourself drifting out to sea wishing that you were wearing deep-sea diving equipment after all. The truth is that you can never be sure if you have decided on the right thing until the party is over, and by then it is too late to go back and change your mind, which is why the world is filled with people doing terrible things and wearing ugly clothing, and so few volunteers who are able to stop them.”
― Lemony Snicket, quote from A Series of Unfortunate Events Box: The Complete Wreck
“As I'm sure you know, to be in one's own room, in one's own bed, can often make a bleak situation a little better”
― Lemony Snicket, quote from A Series of Unfortunate Events Box: The Complete Wreck
“Just because something is typed—whether it is typed on a business card or typed in a newspaper or book—this does not mean that it is true.”
― Lemony Snicket, quote from A Series of Unfortunate Events Box: The Complete Wreck
“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.”
― Lemony Snicket, quote from A Series of Unfortunate Events Box: The Complete Wreck
“For sapphires we are held in here. Only you can end our fear.” Violet said. “Until dawn comes we cannot speak. No words can come from this sad beak.”
― Lemony Snicket, quote from A Series of Unfortunate Events Box: The Complete Wreck
“If you are interested in stories with 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.”
― Lemony Snicket, quote from A Series of Unfortunate Events Box: The Complete Wreck
“trivial as her hair. This morning she was thinking about how to construct”
― Lemony Snicket, quote from A Series of Unfortunate Events Box: The Complete Wreck
“take either forty-eight or eighty-four pages to”
― Lemony Snicket, quote from A Series of Unfortunate Events Box: The Complete Wreck
“white beans, cherry tomatoes, and fresh basil, all mixed together with lime juice, olive oil, and cayenne pepper,”
― Lemony Snicket, quote from A Series of Unfortunate Events Box: The Complete Wreck
“Space doesn't just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.”
― Mary Roach, quote from Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
“Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.”
― Dante Alighieri, quote from La Divina Comedia
“Once one recognizes the value of having difficult obstacles to overcome, it is a simple matter to see the true benefit that can be gained from competitive sports. In tennis who is it that provides a person with the obstacles he needs in order to experience his highest limits? His opponent, of course! Then is your opponent a friend or an enemy? He is a friend to the extent that he does his best to make things difficult for you. Only by playing the role of your enemy does he become your true friend. Only by competing with you does he in fact cooperate! No one wants to stand around on the court waiting for the big wave. In this use of competition it is the duty of your opponent to create the greatest possible difficulties for you, just as it is yours to try to create obstacles for him. Only by doing this do you give each other the opportunity to find out to what heights each can rise.”
― W. Timothy Gallwey, quote from The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance
“In 1908 Johnny Hayes won the Olympic marathon in what a spectator at the time described as “the greatest race of the century.” Hayes’s winning time, which set a world record for the marathon, was 2 hours, 55 minutes, and 18 seconds. Today, barely more than a century later, the world record for a marathon is 2 hours, 2 minutes, and 57 seconds—nearly 30 percent faster than Hayes’s record time—and if you’re an eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old male, you aren’t even allowed to enter the Boston Marathon unless you’ve run another marathon in less than 3 hours, 5 minutes. In short, Hayes’s world-record time in 1908 would qualify him for today’s Boston Marathon (which has about thirty thousand runners) but with not a lot to spare. That same 1908 Summer Olympics saw a near disaster”
― K. Anders Ericsson, quote from Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
“And the third secret about Evil… is its end game. It is, and always has been, to enter humanity, take gradual control of them, and lead them to eternal death. All… by their own free will. All… without them ever… knowing it.”
― Lucian Bane, quote from Seven Sons of Zion
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