The Carnivorous Carnival (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #9)

by Lemony Snicket

“Dragnet!” Sunny said, which meant “But the police think we’re murderers!”

recently looked in the refrigerator of one of my enemies and learned she was a vegetarian, or at least pretending to be one, or had a vegetarian visiting her for a few days.

Besides getting several paper cuts in the same day or receiving the news that someone in your family has betrayed you to your enemies, one of the most unpleasant experiences in life is a job interview.

In most cases, the best strategy for a job interview is to be fairly honest, because the worst thing that can happen is that you won’t get the job and will spend the rest of your life foraging for food in the wilderness and seeking shelter underneath a tree or the awning of a bowling alley that has gone out of business, but in the case of the Baudelaire orphans’ job interview with Madame Lulu, the situation was much more desperate.

“Look at them!” one of the white-faced women laughed. “They can’t even eat an ear of corn! How freakish!”

“I always thought people with birth defects were unfortunate, but now I realize they’re hilarious.”

Miracles are like meatballs, because nobody can exactly agree what they are made of, where they come from, or how often they should appear.

So you might think that there are so many miracles in the world that you can scarcely count them, or that there are so few that they’re scarcely worth mentioning, depending on whether you spend your mornings gazing at a beautiful sunset or lowering yourself into a back alley with a rope fashioned out of matching towels.

before I write down what he said I must tell you that there is one more similarity between a miracle and a meatball, and it is that they both might appear to be one thing but turn out to be another.

“It’s not polite to comment on other people’s appearances,” the hook-handed man said sternly. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, gaze with horror on Hugo, the hunchback! Instead of a regular back, he has a big hump that makes him look very freakish!”

CHAPTER Five

CHAPTER Five

Grief, a type of sadness that most often occurs when you have lost someone you love, is a sneaky thing, because it can disappear for a long time, and then pop back up when you least expect it.

But then, when I am cold and duck into a teashop where the owner is expecting me, I have only to reach for the sugar bowl before my grief returns, and I find myself crying so loudly that other customers ask me if I could possibly lower my sobs.

Count Olaf and Esmé Squalor were bickering in the guest caravan, which was located at the far end of the carnival where I had stayed with my brother so many years ago,

My dear sister, if you are reading this, I am still alive, and heading north to try and find you.

It is hard for decent people to stay angry at someone who has burst into tears, which is why it is often a good idea to burst into tears if a decent person is yelling at you.

The curious thing about being told to sleep on it—a phrase which here means, as I’m sure you know, “to go to bed thinking about something and reach a conclusion in the morning”—is that you usually can’t. If you are thinking over a dilemma, you are likely to toss and turn all night long, thinking over terrible things that can happen and trying to imagine what in the world you can do about it, and these circumstances are unlikely to result in any sleeping at all. Just last night, I was troubled by a decision involving an eyedropper, a greedy night watchman, and a tray of individual custards, and this morning I am so tired that I can scarcely type these worfs.

There are times to stay put, and what you want will come to you, and there are times to go out into the world and find such a thing for yourself.

I can only fulfill my sacred duty and type this story as best I can, down to the last worf.

“Worf,” Sunny said, when the Baudelaires had finished telling her about the train station. By “worf,” she meant something along the lines of, “I don’t think we should stay put. I think we should leave right now.”

If you have ever experienced something that feels strangely familiar, as if the exact same thing has happened to you before, then you are experiencing what the French call “déjà vu.” Like most French expressions—“ennui,” which is a fancy term for severe boredom, or “la petite mort,” which describes a feeling that part of you has died—“déjà vu” refers to something that is usually not very pleasant, and it was not pleasant for the Baudelaire orphans to arrive at the lion pit and experience the queasy feeling of déjà vu.

“I have a question,” asked the woman with dyed hair. “Is this legal?” “Oh, stop spoiling the fun,” her husband said. “You wanted to come and watch people get eaten by lions, and so I brought you. If you’re going to ask a bunch of complicated questions you can go wait in the car.”

“Humanity must perforce prey upon itself, like monsters of the deep,” a sentence which here means “How sad it is that people end up hurting one another as if they were ferocious sea monsters,”