AK GUPTA > AK's Quotes

“Scolding must be very, very fun, otherwise children would be allowed to do it. It is not because children don’t have what it takes to scold. You need only three things, really. You need time, to think up scolding things to say. You need effort, to put these scolding things in a good order, so that the scolding can be more and more insulting to the person being scolded. And you need chutzpah, which is a word for the sort of show-offy courage it takes to stand in front of someone and give them a good scolding, particularly if they are exhausted and sore and not in the mood to hear it.”
― Lemony Snicket, Who Could That Be at This Hour?

“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.”
― Lemony Snicket, Poison for Breakfast

“The world is swirling with so many mysteries and secrets that nobody will ever track down all of them. But with a book you can stay up very late, reading until all the secrets are clear to you. The questions of the world are hidden forever, but the answers in a book are hiding in plain sight.”
― Lemony Snicket, Shouldn't You Be in School?

“If you have read this far in the chronicle of the Baudelaire orphans - and I certainly hope you have not - then you know we have reached the thirteenth chapter of the thirteenth volume in this sad history, and so you know the end is near, even though this chapter is so lengthy that you might never reach the end of it. But perhaps you do not yet know what the end really means. "The end" is a phrase which refers to the completion of a story, or the final moment of some accomplishment, such as a secret errand, or a great deal of research, and indeed this thirteenth volume marks the completion of my investigation into the Baudelaire case, which required much research, a great many secret errands, and the accomplishments of a number of my comrades, from a trolley driver to a botanical hybridization expert, with many, many typewriter repairpeople in between. But it cannot be said that The End contains the end of the Baudelaires' story, any more than The Bad Beginning contained its beginning. The children's story began long before that terrible day on Briny Beach, but there would have to be another volume to chronicle when the Baudelaires were born, and when their parents married, and who was playing the violin in the candlelit restaurant when the Baudelaire parents first laid eyes on one another, and what was hidden inside that violin, and the childhood of the man who orphaned the girl who put it there, and even then it could not be said that the Baudelaires' story had not begun, because you would still need to know about a certain tea party held in a penthouse suite, and the baker who made the scones served at the tea party, and the baker's assistant who smuggled the secret ingredient into the scone batter through a very narrow drainpipe, and how a crafty volunteer created the illusion of a fire in the kitchen simply by wearing a certain dress and jumping around, and even then the beginning of the story would be as far away as the shipwreck that leftthe Baudelaire parents as castaways on the coastal shelf is far away from the outrigger on which the islanders would depart. One could say, in fact, that no story really has a beginning, and that no story really has an end, as all of the world's stories are as jumbled as the items in the arboretum, with their details and secrets all heaped together so that the whole story, from beginning to end, depends on how you look at it. We might even say that the world is always in medias res - a Latin phrase which means "in the midst of things" or "in the middle of a narrative" - and that it is impossible to solve any mystery, or find the root of any trouble, and so The End is really the middle of the story, as many people in this history will live long past the close of Chapter Thirteen, or even the beginning of the story, as a new child arrives in the world at the chapter's close. But one cannot sit in the midst of things forever. Eventually one must face that the end is near, and the end of The End is quite near indeed, so if I were you I would not read the end of The End, as it contains the end of a notorious villain but also the end of a brave and noble sibling, and the end of the colonists' stay on the island, as they sail off the end of the coastal shelf. The end of The End contains all these ends, and that does not depend on how you look at it, so it might be best for you to stop looking at The End before the end of The End arrives, and to stop reading The End before you read the end, as the stories that end in The End that began in The Bad Beginning are beginning to end now.”
― Lemony Snicket, The End

“There are some who say that you should forgive everyone, even the people who
have disappointed you immeasurably. There are others who say you should not forgive anyone, and should stomp off in a huff no matter how many times they apologize.
Of these two philosophies, the second one is of course much more fun, but it can also grow exhausting to stomp off in a huff every time someone has disappointed you, as everyone disappoints everyone eventually, and one can’t stomp off in a huff every minute of the day.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Penultimate Peril

“It is very easy to say that the important thing is to try your best, but if you are in real trouble the most important thing is not trying your best, but getting to safety.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Wide Window

“What you don't read is often as important as what you do read.”
― Lemony Snicket

“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. This is a difficult trick, and most people never master it, and end up dead or uncomfortable at least once during their lives.”
― Lemony Snicket

“This story is about the Baudelaires. And they are the sort of people who know that there’s always something. Something to invent, something to read, something to bite, and something to do, to make a sanctuary, no matter how small. And for this reason, I am happy to say, the Baudelaires were very fortunate indeed.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Bad Beginning

“Wicked people never have time for reading,” Dewey said. “It's one of the reasons for their wickedness.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Penultimate Peril

“Appearance matters a great deal because you can often tell a lot about people by looking at how they present themselves.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Miserable Mill

“He who hesitates is lost”
― Lemony Snicket, The Grim Grotto

“If you enjoy books with happy endings than you are better off reading some other book.”
― Lemony Snicket

“If you were upset about an ugly pimple on the end of your nose, you might try to feel better by keeping your pimple in perspective. You might compare your pimple situation to that of someone who was being eaten by a bear, and when you looked in the mirror at your ugly pimple, you could say to yourself, 'Well, at least I'm not being eaten by a bear.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Wide Window

“You’re noble enough, Baudelaires. That’s all we can ask for in this world.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Penultimate Peril

“He looked like the sort of person who would tell you that he did not have an umbrella to lend you when he actually had several and simply wanted to see you get soaked.”
― Lemony Snicket, When Did You See Her Last?

“Are you who I think you are?”
― Lemony Snicket, The Penultimate Peril

“The library was one enormous room, with long, high metal shelves and the perfect quiet that libraries provide for anyone looking for an answer.”
― Lemony Snicket, Who Could That Be at This Hour?

“Young writers should read
books past bedtime and
write things down in
notebooks when they are
supposed to be doing
something else.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Sometimes you can't really tell when you are happy until it is over and you are thinking about it later”
― Lemony Snicket, Poison for Breakfast

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“Courage isn't having the strength to go on - it is going on when you don't have strength.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“Show me a family of readers, and I will show you the people who move the world.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“History is a set of lies agreed upon.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“Imagination governs the world.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“If you want a thing done well, do it yourself.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“History is written by the winners.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“A woman laughing is a woman conquered.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte, In the Words of Napoleon: A Collection of Quotations of Napoleon Bonaparte

“Men are Moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

“The best way to keep one's word is not to give it.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte