Daniel Handler Quotes

We're all human beings, but some of us are more sophisticated at covering our flaws. We're just smart enough to lie to ourselves that everything is OK.

We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists... in the loved one, perfection.

Perfect can't possibly be the goal, we're left with generous, important and human instead.

Love isn't over when the sheets are stained.

We are convinced that certain people have all the bad qualities we do not know in ourselves.

Because dating is a human exercise, it can be a tightrope fraught with danger. You will be dating imperfect people, and some of them are more imperfect than others. In addition, you are not perfect either, so that complicates the picture.

It's okay that we're not perfect. It's okay that we all have problems. It's okay to cry, to show emotions.

There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.

I've done things that can be made fun of. It's not such a bad thing. If I'm going to end up a role model, then I'd rather not end up being the kind of role model that pretends to be perfect, and pretends that she always has the right thing to say. I'm a product of role models that didn't make me feel like I was as good as them.

I have discovered that many of the things I thought were priceless are as cheap as costume jewelry, and much of what I labeled worthless was, all the time, filled with the kind of beauty that directly nourishes my soul... Now I think that the vast majority of us "normal" people spend our lives trashing our treasures and treasuring our trash. We bustle around trying to create the impression that we are hip, imperturbable, omniscient, in perfect control, when in fact we are awkward and scared and bewildered.

Our actual enemy is not any force exterior to ourselves, but our own crying weaknesses, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism.

None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.

Ugly reports and conversations are always available to those who would promote the sordid and sensational. None of us are yet perfect. We each have failings that aren't terribly difficult to detect especially if that is the aim.

Love is frightened at the intervals of insensibility and callousness that encroach by little and little on the domain of grief, and it makes efforts to recall the keenness of the first anguish.

You show me someone who's led a perfect life and I'll show you a dullard.

Love is a vulnerable thing. Falling in love is like a great drug.

It's shocking when someone who is really bad thinks they're really good. It's heartbreaking, because singing is such a vulnerable thing to do.

I don't think there is such a thing as the perfect system.

The worst lies are the lies we tell ourselves. We live in denial of what we do, even what we think. We do this because we're afraid.We fear we will not find love,and when we find it we fear we'll lose it. We fear that if we don't have love we will be unhappy.

To love is to risk not being loved in return.

The human condition is all about us pretending to be something sometimes that we're not. When you get into the core of people kind of stripping all of that away, that's for me, as an actor, always the most fun stuff to do.

Love is a fault; so be it.

We strive as hard to hide our hearts from ourselves as from others, and always with more success; for in deciding upon our own case we are both judge, jury, and executioner, and where sophistry cannot overcome the first, or flattery the second, self-love is always ready to defeat the sentence by bribing the third.

Romantic poses aside, let us recognize that "falling in love"...is an inferior state of mind, a form of transitory imbecility.

You show me a perfect person and I'll show you somebody who has lived a very closed life.