Poison for Breakfast

by Lemony Snicket

I liked the idea that the moon had a message in it and that some night, if I kept racing around, I might be the person to receive it.

I hope your teeth leave your mouth and run around town biting people and you are blamed and sent to jail.

I get sad, when I think of my own wicked acts, although I suppose if I weren’t sad about them it would mean I didn’t care. I’m glad that I care, so I’m a little happy that I’m sad.

If I were making up a story, I would have it gray and miserable outside, but it was sunny and miserable instead, glaringly bright and bitterly cold, as if the sky could not decide if it was in a good mood or would spend all day growling. I didn’t mind this kind of weather, weather that cannot make up its mind, because I am often the same way, or at least I think I am. I don’t know.

Remember what you learned, years ago: You’re never sorry you brought a book.

Nowadays philosophers are hardly ever tortured, because most people ignore them completely, and it’s hard to say which is the worse fate for philosophy and the people who practice it, being tortured or being ignored.

I can compare my mother to an apple, because she spent some of her early days in a tree, and because I would like her less if she were baked and sprinkled with cinnamon.

Everything that happens to you happens to you. Often boring, sometimes exhausting, and occasionally thrilling, every moment of life is unskippable. In a book, however, you can skip past any part you do not like, which is why all decent authors try not to have any of these parts in the books they write.

so if you are ever asked what a certain person is like, and you cannot think of anything nice to say, you can just reply, “They’re mostly water.”

A proper park is open to the public, and when anything is open to the public, the public gets worried.

The third way eggs can be prepared is poached, a word which here means “simmered and delicious,” and the trick to poaching eggs is to add a bit of vinegar to the water. Vinegar is a strong-smelling liquid which has a magical effect on a poached egg. To experience this magic, boil water in a small pot and then add a bit of vinegar. Then, crack an egg into a small cup, and, using a spoon, create a sort of whirlpool in the boiling water where the egg will go. The water cooks the egg and the vinegar makes it fluffy, so that eating a poached egg is like having a moon, shrouded in clouds, for one’s breakfast. One of the truest things I know is that if you do not like a poached egg, there is something wrong with you.

I love a library. Just to walk inside one, and to breathe in a room where so much literature has been gathered, is such a powerful feeling that it often brings a tear to my eye, although that could also be my mild allergy to dust.

There were books on all sorts of topics, from exciting things of vital importance to things that nobody had reason to care about, but in a library the topics keep taking turns being important or interesting.

Some book of mine—this book of philosophy, for example—may sit ignored and lonely on a high shelf, but then someday a reader will walk into a library and spot the spine of the book they have been waiting for, and they will pluck my book off the shelf and use it to stand on, to reach the book they are excited to read.

Nobody knows anything at all. We have no idea what is happening. We are all bewildered.

We must try, all of us, a lot of the time, our best, and we must keep trying. We do not understand anything but we should try our best to understand each other.