who would dare think that, forever? Some idiot girl who wouldn’t know how things played out.

Like a lot of people whose children were small in the 2000s, I read [Daniel Handler] books out loud and I loved them.

It was darker than a pitch-black panther, covered in tar, eating black licorice at the very bottom of the deepest part of the Black Sea.

A long time ago, there was no such thing as school, and children spent their days learning a trade, a phrase which here means "standing around doing tedious tasks under the instruction of a bossy adult." In time, however, people realized that the children could be allowed to sit, and the first school was invented.

We need things, and the opposite of them, and we are so rarely completely comfortable.

People don't always get what they deserve in this world.

Miracles are like pimples, because once you start looking for them you find more than you ever dreamed you'd see.