Poison for Breakfast

by Lemony Snicket

It is a description I admire very much, because it is so startling that you know no one else has thought of it before the author did, and yet so perfectly clear that you wonder why you never thought of it yourself. All good writing is like this. It is why a favorite book feels like an old friend and a new acquaintance at the same time, and the reason a favorite author can be a familiar figure and a mysterious stranger all at once.

Everybody knows how to breathe, but sometimes you have to stop and teach yourself once more how to do it.

Some breakfasts I do not even open the book, but it sits beside me like a quiet companion while my thoughts wander all over the morning.

I may be thinking of the day ahead of me, or the night I have left behind, or perhaps of things far from my own circumstances, until, in the blink of an eye or a sip of tea, my mind returns to the breakfast table, sometimes with a delicious new idea or a solution to some bewildering problem.

the most exciting and most useful things in the world have been born simply by someone thinking about them.

Many, many more people have died than are living now, so when you die you will have something in common with the vast majority of human beings, but still it is as impossible to imagine as it is to avoid.

You’ve probably tried to imagine it before, as I have, closing your eyes and lying still, the way you might imagine a food you’ve never eaten when you see it on a menu. But we do not know what it really tastes like.

It is one thing to think horrible thoughts, but it is another to behave atrociously,

You can easily think of times when you were horrible, and when I say easily I mean it is very easy to remember these times and hard to stop remembering.

They ache in the brain and the body, these shameful memories, like a broken bone that has...

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.

When you apologize, it is a bit like reaching the last page of a book. The book is still there, with your wicked deed inside, but at least it is closed and put on a shelf.

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.

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

It’s the sort of book that’s so terrific you are almost sorry when you first finish it, because you will never get to read it for the first time again.

There are some librarians so trustworthy and so interesting that you know any book they recommend will be worth your time,

thinking about people, being haunted by them, is the same thing as being haunted by a ghost.

this particular paradox states that we cannot move from one place to another until we first move halfway there,

My family had taught me to eat everything on my plate, especially at a restaurant, where food is more expensive, and so whenever the shoemaker took me out I dutifully ate every bite. But the shoemaker had a different way of thinking. She thought that if you were providing someone with dinner, the only way to tell if they were satisfied was if there was food left on their plate, because it meant you knew for sure they were no longer hungry. So when I ate everything on my plate, she would summon the waiter and order another dish, as was her tradition, and as was my tradition, I would eat every bite, and then she would order something else, and I would keep eating and she would keep ordering and it was like another paradox, in which I was still hungry (according to her) and very full (according to me) at the same time.

Tea is difficult to drink quickly, because it is hot and needs time to steep, and so a cup of tea forces you to slow down and think as you wait for it to cool and become more flavorful.

Many compliments sound like lies,

It has never interested me much to learn the names of different birds, because, of course, you are not really learning their names at all, just names we call them.

many of the people who believe in reincarnation believe that a human is the highest form, the best thing to be when you are reborn. I have never been convinced of this.

We put on disguises sometimes, to pose as people we are not, to hide, or to blend in, or just to see what will happen, hoping that our secrets will never be found out.

the only real surprise in life is when nothing surprising happens.

It was the sort of decision you make so quickly it does not even feel like you are deciding, just that you have already decided.

Often boring, sometimes exhausting, and occasionally thrilling, every moment of life is unskippable.

Being a body of water is something you can say about absolutely anyone, 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.”

Every thought you have feels unnoticed, the way the sky pays no attention to one star’s flickering light, and every word in your brain echoes unremembered in the enormous suitcase of the sea,

Tzimtzum proposes that the world did come from nothing, but that the nothing was made by something, so something made nothing in order for something to come from the nothing, and this may be why we spend most of our lives drifting between nothing and something.

To think about something, you often need to pause first—to make nothing in your mind, just for a second, so there is room for you to think about what it is that has grabbed your attention.

Happiness, in my experience, is like a bowl of bananas, because if you pay too much attention, it gets gobbled away, but if you forget all about it, either a robber steals it or it ends up rotten mush. It can be tricky to keep one’s happiness intact,

Surely someone was not getting enough money. I could imagine them living in poverty, maybe even starving, and yet there was so much bread, right here, that they might eat.

For every creature who is happy and well fed, I thought, imagining the starving people while I stood surrounded by abundance, perhaps there is a creature who is hungry and ruined. No wonder, I thought, some people poison others.

the wrong thing you may have done, is easier to find than comfort and forgiveness, that it takes more effort to be a good person than a bad one, which might be why one sees wickedness in abundance, just sitting and waiting, while goodness is often so elusive,

I always feel hopeful when I step into a park. When a city or town sets aside a piece of land for public relaxation, it is a sign that someone is thinking about the happiness of someone else, that some people are trimming grass and sweeping pathways just so other people can have picnics and take walks or perhaps just sit and think.

A proper park is open to the public, and when anything is open to the public, the public gets worried. If anyone is allowed into a place, then anyone might go there,

But I like to use a park as the antidote to worry, rather than as an excuse to worry further,

It is similar to the sentence the expert had said to me, when I had asked about the birds scrabbling around in the dirt: They do that, a simple and elegant summary of perfectly innocent behavior.

Another interesting thing to do in parks, where so many different people may be seen, is to imagine what everyone is thinking and doing even though you will probably never know.

It is always strange to stand in a place where something happened to you long ago, particularly if the place has not changed much.

You do not always know you are happy when you are happy. Sometimes you can’t really tell when you are happy until it is over and you are thinking about it later.

It can be very powerful to write the name of a person you have kissed or even just someone you wish you had kissed, on a scrap of paper where no one can see, or carved into the trunk of a tree where everyone can.

When you are kissing someone, you feel perhaps that you will never be alone, but of course everyone is alone sometimes. It is lonely, sometimes, to be alone, but some people are good at being lonely. I am one of them.

Telling yourself that something does not matter is one of the loneliest things you can do, because you only say it, of course, about things that matter very much. But often, and this is the lonely part, they only matter to you.

I did not want to die, of course, but it seemed useless to worry about it happening now that it was happening.

A peculiar thing about being embarrassed is that once you have decided you are embarrassed, you become less embarrassed, so I just lay there, knowing I was embarrassed and deciding not to be embarrassed about being embarrassed and getting less and less embarrassed

The admiration is for how the authors put words together, in books you love the most.

“I always enjoy having conversations with authors I am translating,” said the translator, translating as he went, “because reading a book makes me feel as if I am in conversation with the author.”

All of the most important questions in life are dismissed most of the time by most of the people, and it is true that much of the world prefers to do something more practical, such as raising children, or moving a chair to a certain part of the room, or writing themselves a note on a scrap of paper so they remember to buy a new shower curtain, than to sit and think about which came first, the chicken or the egg. But something happens when you think about these enormous questions.