Daniel Handler Quotes

I was early taught by sorrow to shed tears, and now when sudden joy lights up, or any unexpected sorrow strikes my heart, I find it difficult to repress the full and swelling tide of feeling.

Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow.

When you have lived the life I've lived, when you've loved and suffered, and been madly happy and desperately sad -- well, that's when you realize you'll never be able to set it all down. Maybe you'd rather die first.

What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child. From, The Book of Disquiet

Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron. Here is a book [The Lord of the Rings] which will break your heart."

. . . The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation-a book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us.

I never wanted anything so much than to drown in your love and not feel your rain.

Great love, you believe, carries the seeds of great sorrow. Well, perhaps you are right. Perhaps the wise spurn one to remain safe from the other, but I should rather choose to have my eyes burnt in their sockets than to have been born without.

Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas

All you need is the blues. To me, the blues is the book, it's the bible, it's everything.

All the books of the world full of thoughts and poems are nothing in comparison to a minute of sobbing, when feeling surges in waves, the soul feels itself profoundly and finds itself. Tears are the melting ice of snow. All angels are close to the crying person.

Words that come from the heart are never spoken, they get caught in the throat and can only be read in ones's eyes.

I thought about how love was always the thing that did that - smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.

I was so scared about being discovered, but nobody came. Nobody heard. In my own ears, though, my sobs sounded primal and scary, like something I would have turned off if I'd been able to.

And there you are on the shore, fitful and thoughtful, trying to attach them to an idea — some news of your own life. But the lilies are slippery and wild—they are devoid of meaning, they are simply doing, from the deepest spurs of their being, what they are impelled to do every summer. And so, dear sorrow, are you.

As a songwriter, you're allowed to write anything, and as a person, I am all colors in the rainbow. I've been through everything, you know, so I can write a positive song like 'Better Get to Livin'' because that's my attitude. But that doesn't mean I'm happy all the time. You can't be a deep and serious songwriter without feelings. You kinda have to live with your feelings out on your sleeve and get hurt more than most people. The fear I might get hurt means I might not be able to write another song.

I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book.

funny how a beautiful song could tell such a sad story

Perfect love is the most beautiful of all frustrations because it is more than one can express.

I'm still willing to continue living with the burden of this memory. Even though this is a painful memory, even though this memory makes my heart ache. Sometimes I almost want to ask God to let me forget this memory. But as long as I try to be strong and not run away, doing my best, there will finally be someday...there will be finally be someday I can overcome this painful memory. I believe I can. I believe I can do it. There is no memory that can be forgotten, there is not that kind of memory. Always in my heart.

Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place.

It's pretty lonely and sad to be single. Every night was the same for me, I'd go home and curl up in bed with my favorite book. Well, actually it was a magazine.

My feelings for you run very deep." - Loor Not deep enought, I guess." - Bobby (The Rivers of Zadaa)

Nothing is sadder than laughter; nothing more beautiful, more magnificent, more uplifting and enriching than the terror of deep despair.

When [books ban] happened, I felt completely alone and that was scary and sad.