Sometimes, just saying that you hate something, and having someone agree with you, can make you feel better about a terrible situation.

The moral of “The Three Bears” is “Never break into someone else’s house.” The moral of “Snow White” is “Never eat apples.” The moral of World War One is “Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand.” But Violet, Klaus, and Sunny wondered exactly what the moral was of their time with Aunt Josephine.

Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the crimes, follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother’s wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women.

There were many details of their lives that seemed like a strange shape of some great unknown. But this did not concern them as much as you might think. One cannot spend forever sitting and solving the mysteries of one's history, and no matter how much one reads, the whole story can never be told.

I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong. I will love you as a battlefield loves young men and as peppermints love your allergies. (1/4)

Just about everything in this world is easier said than done, with the exception of “systematically assisting Sisyphus’s stealthy, cyst-susceptible sister,” which is easier done than said.

One of the remarkable things about love is that, despite very irritating people writing poems and songs about how pleasant it is, it really is quite pleasant.

For Beatrice —

We are like boats, passing in the night —
particularly you.

667. Very Fascinating Digits.

There are those who say that life is like a book, with chapters for each event in your life and a limited number of pages on which you can spend your time. But I prefer to think that a book is like a life, particularly a good one, which is well worth staying up all night to finish.

One of the world’s tiresome questions is what object one would bring to a desert island. People always answer “a deck of cards” or “Anna Karenina” when the obvious answer is “a well-equipped boat to sail me back home where I can play all the card games and read all the Russian novels I want.”

If writers wrote as carelessly as some people talk, then adhasdh asdglaseuyt[bn[ pasdlgkhasdfasdf.

Everyone, at some point in their lives, wakes up in the middle of the night with the feeling that they are all alone in the world, and that nobody loves them now and that nobody will ever love them, and that they will never have a decent night’s sleep again and will spend their lives wandering (1/2)

To Beatrice —
Darling, dearest, dead.