Quotes from Adverbs

Daniel Handler ·  288 pages

Rating: (4K votes)


“Someone can break your heart, leave you dead on the lawn, and still you never learn what to say to stop it all over again. ”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“How do you forget something? You just walk away from it, those who are still alive. There are so few clearings in our hearts and minds, so few places where something can't grow on top of whatever happened to us before, and this is love too. ”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“They looked at each other like a pair of parentheses.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“This is love, to sit with someone you've known forever in a place you've been meaning to go, and watching as their life happens to them until you stand up and it's time to go.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“It is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes; it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs



“So she loved him. She just did immediately and again often and clearly naturally and soundly and obviously and many others.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“I have a dream of what would have happened if what happened instead hadn't.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“I want to love you and take you pretty places. Yes, I have things wrong, but also I can walk through walls if you'll let me show you.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“Love is candy from a stranger, but it's candy you've had before and it probably won't kill you.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“They say love's like a bus, and if you wait long enough another one will come along, but not in this place where the buses are slow and most of the cute ones are gay.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs



“You meet people who are in pain in life and love and you forgive them for behaving the way they do.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“The window rattles without you, you bastard. The trees are the cause, rattling in the wind, you jerk, the wind scraping those leaves and twigs against my window. They'll keep doing this, you terrible husband, and slowly wear away our entire apartment building. I know all these facts about you and there is no longer any use for them. What will I do with your license plate number, and where you hid the key outside so we'd never get locked out of this shaky building? What good does it do me, your pants size and the blue cheese preference for dressing? Who opens the door in the morning now, and takes the newspaper out of the plastic bag when it rains? I'll never get back all the hours I was nice to your parents. I nudge my cherry tomatoes to the side of the plate, bastard, but no one is waiting there with a fork to eat them. I miss you and I love you, bastard bastard bastard, come and clean the onion skins out of the crisper and trim back the tree so I can sleep at night.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“Love was in the air, so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“After a certain age, you couldn't even say where you were from. You went someplace, and lived there. And then you went someplace else.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“Love can smack you like a seagull, and pour all over your feet like junk mail.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs



“ But there was more, as there always is when the love goes. She was haunted, naturally. Otherwise what is the point, why leave your rickety house, and why this yo-yo world giving us things and yanking them back?”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“The clock in his car hadn't adjusted to daylight saving time yet and said it was four-fifteen when it was really five-fifteen. Peter probably didn't have time to fiddle with it, or it was tricky, as car clocks are. I didn't mind. You can't mind these things, you just can't, for to dislike what makes a person human is to dislike all humans, or at least other people who can't work clocks. You have to love the whole person, if you are truly in love. If you are going to take a lifelong journey with somebody, you can't mind if the other person believes they are leaving for that journey an hour earlier than you, as long as truly, in the real world, you are both leaving at exactly the same time.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“This is love if it's not with you, a terrible fiery something that makes people look away, and it feels like a punch in the throat.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“Once more, this is love: it rings and you open up unless it looks like an ax murderer.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“We need things, and the opposite of them, and we are so rarely completely comfortable.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs



“And when love is over when the diner of love seems closed from the outside you want all those hours back along with anything you left at the lover’s house and maybe a couple of things which aren’t technically yours on the grounds that you wasted a portion of your life and those hours have all gone southside.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“They say that when you’re really in love, the world becomes gossamer and gorgeous, but in my experience the world gets grimy, and the love object is in stark relief from the surroundings. This is love, a pretty thing on an ugly street.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“Help me,' Allison says, but she is soft-spoken, and everyone she loves is so far away.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“It’s not the makeup and it’s not the way that you dance and this is like love too where there’s only one dancer who will win your contest that night and they are not particularly the best one”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“I want you to love me in particular.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs



“You're a ghost! Eddie cried. You're empty and you have nothing inside you.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“You can’t mind these things, you just can’t, for to dislike what makes a person human is to dislike all humans.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


“The movie was kickass, which was appropriate, because tonight it was called Kickass: The Movie.”
― Daniel Handler, quote from Adverbs


About the author

Daniel Handler
Born place: in San Francisco, California, The United States
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Popular quotes

“The first sound was the bowstrings, the snap of five thousand hemp cords being tightened by stressed yew, and that sound was like the devil’s harpstrings being plucked. Then there was the arrow sound, the sigh of air over feathers, but multiplied, so that it was like the rushing of a wind. That sound diminished as two clouds of arrows, thick as any flock of starlings, climbed into the gray sky. Hook, reaching for another broadhead, marveled at the sight of five thousand arrows in two sky-shadowing groups. The two storms seemed to hover for a heart’s beat at the height of their trajectory, and then the missiles fell. It was Saint Crispin’s Day in Picardy. For an instant there was silence. Then the arrows struck. It was the sound of steel on steel. A clatter, like Satan’s hailstorm.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Azincourt


“It may be," replied Coll, smiling, "we know least what we treasure most. But we will have more than enough to keep us busy when you come back, and you will learn, my boy, there is nothing like work to put the heart at rest.”
― Lloyd Alexander, quote from The Castle of Llyr


“Wherefore it would appear that this number was thus allied unto her for the purpose of signifying that, at her birth, all these nine heavens were at perfect unity with each other as to their influence. This is one reason that may be brought: but more narrowly considering, and according to the infallible truth, this number was her own self: that is to say, by similitude. As thus. The number three is the root of the number nine; seeing that without the interposition of any other number, being multiplied merely by itself, it produceth nine, as we manifestly perceive that three times three are nine. Thus, three being of itself the efficient of nine, and the Great Efficient of Miracles being of Himself Three Persons (to wit: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit), which, being Three, are also One:—this lady was accompanied by the number nine to the end that men might clearly perceive her to be a nine, that is, a miracle, whose only root is the Holy Trinity. It may be that a more subtile person would find for this thing a reason of greater subtilty: but such is the reason that I find, and that liketh me best.”
― Dante Alighieri, quote from Vita Nuova


“That after an hour's silence he can say, The one thing I cannot stand is dampness... That's all, it took him an hour to work that out.”
― William Gaddis, quote from The Recognitions


“The Rum Tum Tugger is a Curious Cat:
If you offer him pheasant he would rather have grouse.
If you put him in a house he would much prefer a flat,
If you put him in a flat then he'd rather have a house.
If you set him on a mouse then he only wants a rat,
If you set him on a rat then he'd rather chase a mouse.
Yes the Rum Tum Tugger is a Curious Cat -
And there isn't any call for me to shout it:
For he will do
As he do do
And there's no doing anything about it!”
― T.S. Eliot, quote from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats


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