Daniel Handler Quotes

This life of ours, this is a wonderful life. If you can get through life like this and get away with it, hey that's great. But it's very predictable. There's so many ways you can screw it up.

No one sets their life out and says, 'Boy, this is what I think I'm going to go through.'

To be a man, to have been born without knowing it or wanting it, to be thrown into the ocean of existence, to be obliged to swim, to exist; to have an identity; to resist the pressure and shocks from the outside and the unforeseen and unforeseeable acts - one's own and those of others - which so often exceed one's capacities? And what is more, to endure one's own thoughts about all this: in a word, to be human.

. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.

The hardest thing in this world, is to live in it.

Whatever past you had, when you become a mother, it [life] is a whole different thing. You can't even predict it.

We are an intelligent species caught in an historical process. No generation which proceeded us knew what was going on, and there is no reason to assume that we know what's going on or that the generation which follows us will know what's going on. And what kind of trip is it anyway to insist on knowing what's going on?

Discouragement seizes us only when we can no longer count on chance.

Each time my mother went psychotic, I hoped it would be the last time. Afterward she would tell me, 'I think that was the final episode. I think I had a breakthrough.' And I would believe-for a few months-that it was true. That she was back to stay. Maybe it was like having a rock star mother who was always on the road. Were there Benatar children? Did they sit around and wonder if their mom's Hell is for Children tour was going to be her last tour?

What a bummer it is to be a human being.

But don't you see, all human decisions are made like this. Do you think the mother knows what will happen to the child in her womb? Dear God, we are lost, I tell you. What does it matter if you give it to me and it's wrong! There is no wrong! There is only desperation, and I would have it! I want to live forever with you.

There is this thing called life. We live it, not as we intend or wish, but as we are driven on by forces outside and inside ourselves.

Only later did I come to understand that to be a mother is to be an illusion. No matter how vigilant, in the end a mother can't protect her child - not from pain, or horror, or the nightmare of violence, from sealed trains moving rapidly in the wrong direction, the depravity of strangers, trapdoors, abysses, fires, cars in the rain, from chance.

Humankind is made for uncertainty, struggle, choice and change.

There are very few women from my mother's generation who worked like that, who just kept a career going all her life and raised children and had horrible relationships and lost all her money and got it back again.

It's a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand.

Life is a whoopee cushion, a chair pulled away just as you were taking a seat.

The world would get along very well without literature. It would get along even better without man.

Life brings with it strangeness and surprises and upsets

That wind. I see it's blowing now. Furtive but commanding, it has dictated every move we've ever made. My mother felt it, and so do I - even here, even now - as it sweeps us like leaves into his backseat corner, dancing us to shreds against the stones. V'la l'bon vent, v'a l'joli vent. I though we'd silenced it for good. But the smallest thing can wake the wind@ a word, a sign, even a death. There's no such thing as a trivial thing. Everything costs; it all adds up until finally the balance shifts and we're gone again, back on the road, telling ourselves - well maybe next time

Without my women friends, I wouldn't know anything. They've been my teachers and my mothers. My mother was a wonderful person, but she didn't give me a lot of the stuff I needed to advance myself as an adult woman. I have a really strong group of girlfriends, and we share a lot with one another - the complications of raising children, marriages, personal and physical struggles.

The future will be what it will, and fretting about it will only make your fears more likely to come true.

It's risky because any number of things are going to happen that nobody can foresee. But right now everybody is the left is playing to type. They are behaving exactly as you could predict. They're children.

Nothing is so false as human life, nothing so treacherous. God knows no one would have accepted it as a gift, if it had not been given without our knowledge.

Well, that’s that, then. We’re all going to die. Charming.