Lately it has become more and more difficult to attend dinner parties without the evening ending in gunfire or tapioca.

But one type of book that practically no one likes to read is a book about the law. Books about the law are notorious for being very long, very dull, and very difficult to read. This is one reason many lawyers make heaps of money. The money is an incentive - the word "incentive" here means "an offered reward to persuade you to do something you don't want to do - to read long, dull, and difficult books.

You might be afraid of the dark, but the dark is not afraid of you. That’s why the dark is always close by.

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.

There are many reasons, of course, why someone might snap their fingers and grin. If you heard some pleasing music, for instance, you might snap your fingers and grin to demonstrate that the music had charms that could soothe your savage breast. If you were employed as a spy, you might snap your fingers and grin in order to deliver a message in secret snapping-and-grinning code.

I don't know why wicked places generally look wicked. You'd think they'd look nice, to fool people, but they hardly ever do.

I think if I were walking someplace and I saw a corpse my brain would tell me it was a million things before I believed it was a corpse.