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
“All around them were the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers. They lined the verges of the roads and floated in the canals, jammed together around the pillars of the bridges. In the trenches between the burial mounds hundreds of dead soldiers sat side by side with their heads against the torn earth, as if they had fallen asleep together in a deep dream of war.”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Empire of the Sun
“Schartz would never live in a world so open. His would always be occluded by the fact that his understanding and his ambition outstripped his talent. He'd never be as good as he wanted to be, not at baseball, not at football, not at reading Greek or taking the LSAT. And beyond all that he'd never be as _good_ as he wanted to be. He'd never found anything inside himself that was really good and pure, that wasn't double-edged, that couldn't just as easily become its opposite. He had tried and failed to find that thing and he would continue to try and fail, or else he would leave off trying and keep on failing. He had no art to call his own. He knew how to motivate people, manipulate people, move them around, this was his only skill. He was like a minor Greek god you've barely heard of, who sees through the glamour of the armor and down into the petty complexity of each soldier's soul. And in the end is powerless to bring about anything resembling his vision. The loftier, arbitrary gods intervene.”
― Chad Harbach, quote from The Art of Fielding
“Jack laughed behind him, a mirthless sound from a man who had been on the wrong end of life's ironies too many times.”
― quote from The Elephant Tree
“I’ve only ever loved one girl, Tru – and that’s you. It’s always been you. I loved you from the moment I knew how to love.”
― Samantha Towle, quote from The Mighty Storm
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, quote from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
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