Every new promise was like something heavy I had to carry, with no place to put anything down.

This toast feels raw. Is it safe to eat raw toast?

The library was one enormous room, with long, high metal shelves and the perfect quiet that libraries provide for anyone looking for an answer.

And a refrigerator may hold a basket of strawberries, which would be important if a maniac said to you, "If you don't give me a basket of strawberries right now, I'm going to poke you with this large stick." But when the two elder Baudelaires and Quigley Quagmire opened the refrigerator, they found nothing that would help someone who was wounded, dying of thirst, or being threatened by a strawberry-crazed, stick-carrying maniac.

All his life, Klaus had believed that if you read enough books, you could solve any problem, but now he wasn't so sure.

It turns out she is Canadian, my editor, and so she drinks like a fish. So she wasn't a lightweight at all. And in the morning, she said that the idea still seemed like a good one, and here we are.

The worst surroundings in the world can be tolerated if the people in them are interesting and kind.