The End (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #13)

by Lemony Snicket

For Beatrice— I cherished, you perished, The world’s been nightmarished.

Some believe that everyone is born with a moral compass already inside them, like an appendix, or a fear of worms. Others believe that a moral compass develops over time, as a person learns about the decisions of others by observing the world and reading books. In any case, a moral compass appears to be a delicate device, and as people grow older and venture out into the world, it often becomes more and more difficult to figure out which direction one’s moral compass is pointing, so it is harder and harder to figure out the proper thing to do.

All day long, everyone in the world is succumbing to peer pressure, whether it is the pressure of their fourth grade peers to play dodge ball during recess or the pressure of their fellow circus performers to balance rubber balls on their noses, and if you try to avoid every instance of peer pressure you will end up without any peers whatsoever, and the trick is to succumb to enough pressure that you do not drive your peers away, but not so much that you end up in a situation in which you are dead or otherwise uncomfortable.

“Life isn’t fair,”

“Nowhere in the world is safe,”

If you’ve ever lost someone, then you know that sometimes when you think of them you try to imagine where they might be,

the sea, which some have said is nothing but a library of all the tears in history.

“Sometimes the things you’ve lost can be found again in unexpected places,”

The custom of my family is to name a baby for someone who has died.”

“‘The night has a thousand eyes,’” Kit said hoarsely, and lifted her head to face the villain. The Baudelaires could tell by her voice that she was reciting the words of someone else. “‘And the day but one; yet the light of the bright world dies with the dying sun. The mind has a thousand eyes, and the heart but one: yet the light of a whole life dies when love is done.’”

Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the crimes, follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother’s wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women.

no matter how much one reads, the whole story can never be told.

For Beatrice— We are like boats passing in the night— particularly you.