Hope

“1.​Don’t think about your dirty dishes as ghosts, I told myself. 2.​Or how the chair looks lonely without you in it, Snicket—a wooden outline of someone sitting. 3.​Grab a pen and a few scraps of paper, so you can take notes on your investigation. 4.​In fact, perhaps you’ve already taken a note or two, while you were thinking about all those other things. 5.​And bring the book you were reading at breakfast. 6.​Remember what you learned, years ago: You’re never sorry you brought a book. 7.​Besides, it’s a small book. Look, it fits easily in the pocket of your coat. 8.​It’s why you like that coat so much, because books fit in its pockets, 9.​So you can take books with you on all your journeys. 10.​Leave now. 11.​Don’t think about journeys,”
― Lemony Snicket, Poison for Breakfast

“God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.”
― Lemony Snicket, Poison for Breakfast

“I can compare the pencil I am using to write these words (and these words, and these and these) to my own life, because it is sometimes sharp and sometimes dull, and because it is getting shorter and shorter the more I use it, and because even when I try to erase things you can still see the marks they left behind.”
― Lemony Snicket, Poison for Breakfast

“It was a familiar feeling, to be hurrying someplace without really knowing what is going on. When I was a child, this happened all the time, because when you are a child, nothing is your business, and you are constantly being yanked one place or another with no satisfying explanation provided by the adults doing the yanking, and so you soon get used to being in a constant state of bewilderment. You are yanked awake in the morning, often before you want to get out of bed, and you are yanked toward breakfast and away from the table before you are done. You are probably yanked toward school, whether or not you are in the mood, and it might be a school in which you are yanked from one room to another to learn about different things, or one in which you stay in one room and your brain is yanked from subject to subject no matter what you might be thinking about. Sometimes you have a good time and sometimes you do not, but never is there a satisfying answer if you ask Why can’t I stay in bed a little longer and read the poem about the sea being “all a case of knives”? or Couldn’t I please instead just eat a little more toast and finish this chapter? or What reason could there possibly be that I must face the blackboard instead of looking out the window at the rain making quick tiny circles everywhere on the ground? and even now, when I am an adult and sometimes find myself being asked questions like these, as my hand reaches out to yank someone someplace, I have no good answer.”
― Lemony Snicket, Poison for Breakfast