For Beatrice, our love broke my heart, and stopped yours.

There are almost as many kinds of libraries as there are kinds of readers.

It is much, much worse to receive bad news through the written word than by somebody simply telling you, and I’m sure you understand why. When somebody simply tells you bad news, you hear it once, and that’s the end of it. But when bad news is written down, whether in a letter or a newspaper or on your arm in felt tip pen, each time you read it, you feel as if you are receiving the bad news again and again.

I'm always loath to make generalizations about what is for children and what isn't. Certainly children's literature as a genre has some restrictions, so certain things will never pop up in a Snicket book. But I didn't know anything about writing for children when I started - this is the theme of naïveté creeping up on us once more - and I sort of still don't, and I'm happy that adults are reading them as well as children.

Why not rise from the grave and terrorize a little instead of staying buried and dead in the cemetery?

Figuratively, they escaped from Cout Olaf and their miserable existence. They did not literally escape, because they were still in his house and vulnerable to Olaf's evil in loco parentis ways.

But it's far too late for us; ring, hair, letters, photographs - all traces of our love will be scattered then, like an anagram.