Daniel Handler Quotes

I don't know what she is now. A stranger, mostly. It's as if she has become a part of a different world, one that doesn't include me anymore.

You’ve been wondering lately when the moment is that somebody is truly lost to you.

I am dead to them, even though I once flowered.

Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

There is a chasm between me and the world outside of me. A gap so wide my feelings can't cross it. By the time my screams reach the other side, they have dwindled into groans.

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

Now they were as strangers; nay worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted.

But after a moment a sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well been half the world apart.

How can you be alienated without first having been connected?

Society's dark hull drifts further and further away. It is this place - the place of our separation, our distinction - that much of his poetry occupies.

The entire time I was in Portland, which was the five years, I had absolutely no contact with any of my family.

Being sent away to school was no different from my biological mother giving me away.

Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.

Everything else outside me seems far, far away.

I felt like I might as well have been living in another part of the solar system.

I certainly feel sad about the alienation from my son.

There's certainly a loss of connection with folks on the ground who I care for and love and I want to spend time with.

Now we're like planets, holding to each other from a great distance. [...] Now we're hundreds of miles apart, our short arms keep us lonely, no one hears what's in my head. [...] It's March, even the birds don't know what to do with themselves.

You never come back, not all the way. Always there is an odd distance between you and the people you love and the people you meet, a barrier thin as the glass of a mirror, you never come all the way out of the mirror; you stand, for the rest of your life, with one foot in this world and no one in another, where everything is upside down and backward and sad.

In the end, the only thing between us was silence.

The most difficult part for me is feeling connected to the people that I love but always being on the go to different places.

We found ourselves veiled and separated from our friends.

...sometimes it only makes one more lonely to know that somewhere else, one's friends and family are well.

I am too far away from what I love and my distance is without remedy.

I squeeze my eyes shut and try to reach for him across the hundreds and hundreds of miles, to send my thoughts into his mind, to let him know he is not alone. But he is. And I can't help him.