Daniel Handler Quotes

What happens in a certain place can stain your feelings for that location, just as ink can stain a white sheet.

The worst moment of one's life could be seared into the memory, brighter than any joy.

He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.

Never while anything is left of me shall this... camp be forgotten. It has fairly grown into me, not merely as memory pictures, but as part and parcel of mind and body alike.

The first cut is the deepest.

When you're bullied in high school, even if it's the smallest amount, or you're actually tortured, I feel like everybody carries that with them. They always think of that one person who treated them badly in high school.

I think that being bullied is a shameful experience.

All I can say is sometimes home gets burned into your occipital lobe, and it can't leave you, and there's always that longing.

The big 'Aha!' moment is that the trauma never goes away.

I always tend to tilt dark on an ending, because I feel like, especially with horror movies, those are the endings that don't evaporate. Those are the ones that stick with you.

There are certain images that always haunt me.

The one-word story about why I have a chip on my shoulder is 'bullying.'

The only lasting trauma is the one we suffer without positive change.

Shame--what happened when my mother, the dragon, huffed and puffed and blew my self down.

But the hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.

Just because your leg might heal doesn't mean it doesn't feel broken. It doesn't mean that a car hitting your body doesn't hurt like the same it would hurt if a car hit your body.

I'm incapable of describing the feeling with which I left. I wouldn't want it ever to be repeated, but I would have considered myself unfortunate if I'd never experienced it.

If all the people who have been hurt by the war were to exclude joy from their lives, it would almost be as if they had died.

The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What's left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars.

Do certain events in our lives leave a permanent mark, freezing a piece of us in time, and that becomes a touchstone that we measure the rest of our lives against?

After all, how many of us had tried to forget something traumatic...only to find it printed on the back of our eyelids, tattooed on our tongues?

no one had experiences any more, only traumas.

There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of happiness.

Grief doesn't fade. Grief scabs over like my scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits. It hurts in new ways. We are never free from grief.

Every fear, every night terror, every hour I cried for Liev, every fight with Sebastian is registered as a neat white scar.