The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #1)

by Lemony Snicket

Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming, and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery, and despair.

Violet Baudelaire, the eldest, liked to skip rocks.

Klaus Baudelaire, the middle child, and the only boy, liked to examine creatures in tidepools.

Sunny Baudelaire, the youngest, liked to bite things. She was an infant, and very small for her age, scarcely larger than a boot.

If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels, and if you haven’t, you cannot possibly imagine it.

From time to time, the Baudelaire children looked at one another, but with their future such a mystery they could think of nothing to say.

Sometimes, just saying that you hate something, and having someone agree with you, can make you feel better about a terrible situation.

You and I, of course, would never do this to any of our grieving acquaintances, but it is a sad truth in life that when someone has lost a loved one, friends sometimes avoid the person, just when the presence of friends is most needed.

The money is an incentive—the word “incentive” here means “an offered reward to persuade you to do something you don’t want to do”—to read long, dull, and difficult books.

Back when his parents were alive, Klaus used to take a flashlight to bed with him and hide under the covers, reading until he couldn’t keep his eyes open.

I used to do the same thing

He found himself reading the same sentence over and over. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over.

This play you’re putting on shouldn’t be called The Marvelous Marriage. It should be called The Menacing Marriage.

The really frightening thing about Olaf, she realized, was that he was very smart after all. He wasn’t merely an unsavory drunken brute, but an unsavory, clever drunken brute.

They didn’t understand it, but like so many unfortunate events in life, just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it isn’t so.