Poison for Breakfast

by Lemony Snicket

If I find myself among strangers, at a bus stop for example, or in an elevator or a small island surrounded by crocodiles, and everyone says “good morning,” then I know we are all civilized people and things will turn out all right.

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.

Swimming in the ocean is like being a speck of dust in a large empty suitcase, or one tiny star in the endless sky. 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, so you stop thinking at all.

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.

there is always something distrustful about a place so eager to please.

I want to be friends with people who are honest and interesting, generous but not ridiculous, thoughtful but who don’t have irritating voices.

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.

But I like to use a park as the antidote to worry, rather than as an excuse to worry further, and I never mind whatever animals I see in a park.

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.

loneliest people in the whole wide world are the ones you’re never going to see again,

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.

Being clumsy treats you to views of the world of which graceful people never get a glimpse.

just as you do not remember your life before you were in the world.

You can eat it with a tiny spoon, alongside a sliced pear, a piece of toast with goat’s-milk cheese, and a cup of tea with honey, and enjoy all this while reading, never knowing if it is your last breakfast, if today is the day you will be spooned out of the world, but hoping that you, like the egg, are perfectly prepared.

I understood that I knew nothing, that all the tiny things in my mind were just little tricks, as far from truth and wisdom as vinegar is from the question of whether the chicken or the egg came first.

It is one of the mysteries of the world that you can change the landscape with your mind, that everything around you can move and shift just from the way you are imagining it.

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

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. We have poisoned ourselves,

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. It is even like that with books.

I preferred not to die. But that was a ridiculous thing to say. I knew I would die. I had just been thinking about it that morning, that we are all going to die. The end of your life is like the open manhole you’ll fall into one day while walking around, that one terrible step which will leave you in thin air and then darkness and then nothing.

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

the loneliest people in the whole wide world are the ones you’re never going to see again.

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.

We should swim and walk in parks, thinking.

He stopped and sat next to me and did not speak a word. He did not say anything at all, and I could not tell you why it was the most perfect thing to do.

I had not thought of that story in a while, and I was glad to do so.