Poison for Breakfast

by Lemony Snicket

It is almost as if enormous philosophical questions are not designed to be answered at all, but just to make you think.

the trick with scrambled eggs is never to eat them.

The rest of us should turn on an oven to a high temperature and read a few pages of a book until the oven has heated itself up.

Eat your baked egg while crying and nursing your fingers, knowing that it happens to anyone who prepares a baked egg.

the trick to preparing a boiled egg is to remember that you will die.

And that moment, for the first time I can remember, I understood that I knew nothing, that all the tiny things in my mind were just little tricks,

because 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.

the book you hardly notice is the book someone else is breathless to find,

A fantastic librarian can help you find what you are looking for, and not just if it is a book. A fantastic librarian can help you find a hobby or an occupation, a cure or a challenge, a quiet fact or a loud opinion, or a small town where you might hide for months. A fantastic librarian knows more about what you are looking for than you do,

A fantastic librarian reads everything two times at least.

“Countless writers express countless ideas on so many bits of paper, and at some unknown moment some specific book, even some specific sentence, will be the right one for the right person. We never know when some scrap of literature will have its finest hour.”

Can you imagine?” “No,” I said. “I guess I’d better keep reading.”

“Few people can be happy,” says a famous philosopher, “unless they hate some other person, nation or creed.” “Creed” refers to what people believe,

Not all suffering is the same, and we are not all suffering at the same time, but every person or nation or creed has had their turn, or is waiting their turn to suffer or to force suffering on us, sometimes so terribly that for some of us, at some moment somewhere in the world, the only escape is into the world of the imagination, because we cannot really imagine what is happening and what we have done.

There are so many objects that I find that I have forgotten about until they are in my hands again, and they remind me of times in my life I had otherwise forgotten, the way you will visit a place you think is new and then something, a sound or smell or some tiny detail, will make you realize it is familiar after all.

and I told myself that this was a silly way to describe a room, to say it was empty except for many, many things.

A nice short sentence feels like something has been left out, which helps give it the element of surprise.

Each meal you eat is poison, because the food is just moving you through the world and the end of your time in it.

I like this poem but I do not understand it,

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.

The writer who said, “God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through” is Paul Valéry, from his book about bad thoughts.

The philosopher who said that few people can be happy without hating some other person, etc., is Bertrand Russell.