As she worked, she remembered something her parents had said to her when Klaus was born, and against when they brought Sunny home from the hospital. 'you are the eldest Baudelaire child,' they had said, kindly but firmly. 'And as the eldest, it will ...
It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between "literally" and "figuratively." If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feels like it is happening. If you are literally jumping ...
Anyone who knew Violet well could tell she was thinking hard, because her long hair was tied up in a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes. Violet had a real knack for inventing and building strange devices, so her brain was often filled with images of p...
But the law is an odd thing. For instance, one country in Europe has a law that requires all its bakers to sell bread at the exact same price. A certain island has a law that forbids anyone from removing its fruit. And a town not too far from where y...
If we fail to provide boys with pro-social models of the transition to adulthood, they may construct their own. In some cases, gang initiation rituals, street racing, and random violence may be the result.
People underestimate the importance of dilligence as a virtue. No doubt it has something to do with how supremely mundane it seems. It is defined as "the constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken."... Understood, however, as the pr...
The striking thing is that WHO doesn't really have the authority to do any of this. It can't tell governments what to do. It hires no vaccinators, distributes no vaccine. It is a small Geneva bureaucracy run by several hundred international delegates...
I was a swimmer growing up, which meant being in the pool at 5 A.M. You get used to it. You get up at 4:15 A.M.; my parents, who were amazing, they were up at 4:15 A.M. or earlier to drop me off at the pool and then go to work. I eventually stopped d...
I like to be surrounded by books. My wife Evelyn has a Ph.D. in comparative literature, so we have a lot of her Spanish and German literature books which are wasted on me, plus a lot of novels and books on art and architecture shared by us both. Evel...
Yes, I know," Isadora said, and then read her poem, leaning forward so Carmelita Spats would not overhear: "I would rather eat a bowl of vampire bats than spend an hour with Carmelita Spats." The Baudelaires giggled and then covered their mouths so n...
As I'm sure you know, there are two types of "What?" in the world. The first type simply means "Excuse me, I didn't hear you. Could you please repeat yourself?" The second type is a little trickier. It means something more along the lines of "Excuse ...
If you were smart," Genghis said, "you would have borrowed the silverware of one of your friends." "We never thought of that," Klaus said. When one is forced to tell atrocious lies, one often feels a guilty flutter in one's stomach, and Klaus felt su...
Therefore, it is we who are responsible for much of the evil in the world; and we are each morally required to accept rather than project that ponderous responsibility-lest we prefer instead to wallow in a perennial state of powerless, frustrated, fu...
Integrity is unity of the personality; it implies being brutally honest with ourselves about our intentionality. Since intentionality is inextricably bound up with the daimonic, this is never an easy, nor always pleasant pursuit. But being willing to...
Because you can text while doing something else, texting does not seem to take time but to give you time. This is more than welcome; it is magical.
Through being fired I was given the perfect circumstances to finally answer my calling and live my dream, and I remain grateful to this day for that television network firing me. Without them, I would have refused the call to follow my dream, and I w...
No one will ever understand like I do. You’re so different with me, baby. You take care of me. You make me feel safe. You’re not who you think you are. Didn’t you once tell me that people aren’t just one thing? You’re so much more to me tha...
As I said, it comes with a price.” His grin was wicked and I suddenly felt a little breathless. “I’m a hard man to please. And I’m also a very busy man. You’ll do what I want when I want and I won’t always be nice about it. In fact, consi...
If an optimist had his left arm chewed off by an alligator, he might say in a pleasant and hopeful voice, "Well this isn't too bad, I don't have a left arm anymore but at least nobody will ever ask me if I'm left-handed or right-handed," but most of ...
Let’s start with this statistic: You are delicious. Be brave, my sweet. I know you can get lonely. I know you can crave companionship and sex and love so badly that it physically hurts. But I truly believe that the only way you can find out that th...
Nat: Maybe you broke something. Midge: I know. Never fall down, never fall down! Nat: Ah, it's nothing. I fall down every morning. I get up, I have a cup of coffee, I fall down. That's the system. Two years old, you stand up and then BOOM! seventy ye...
