Adverbs Daniel Handler Quotes

Someone can break your heart, leave you dead on the lawn, and still you never learn what to say to stop it all over again.

This is love, to sit with someone you've known forever in a place you've been meaning to go, and watching as their life happens to them until you stand up and it's time to go.

They looked at each other like a pair of parentheses.

It is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes; it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe.

How do you forget something? You just walk away from it, those who are still alive. There are so few clearings in our hearts and minds, so few places where something can't grow on top of whatever happened to us before, and this is love too.

I have a dream of what would have happened if what happened instead hadn't.

So she loved him. She just did immediately and again often and clearly naturally and soundly and obviously and many others.

Love is candy from a stranger, but it's candy you've had before and it probably won't kill you.

I want to love you and take you pretty places. Yes, I have things wrong, but also I can walk through walls if you'll let me show you.

You meet people who are in pain in life and love and you forgive them for behaving the way they do.

They say love's like a bus, and if you wait long enough another one will come along, but not in this place where the buses are slow and most of the cute ones are gay.

After a certain age, you couldn't even say where you were from. You went someplace, and lived there. And then you went someplace else.

Love was in the air, so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner.

Love can smack you like a seagull, and pour all over your feet like junk mail.

Everybody has a theory.

Why haven't we fixed sick yet? You scientists there-- put down those starfish and HELP us. I hereby demand that all the people who are good at math make the world free of illness. The rest of us will write you epic poems and staple them together into a booklet.

But there was more, as there always is when the love goes. She was haunted, naturally. Otherwise what is the point, why leave your rickety house, and why this yo-yo world giving us things and yanking them back?

This is love if it's not with you, a terrible fiery something that makes people look away, and it feels like a punch in the throat.

We need things, and the opposite of them, and we are so rarely completely comfortable.

Once more, this is love: it rings and you open up unless it looks like an ax murderer.

They say that when you’re really in love, the world becomes gossamer and gorgeous, but in my experience the world gets grimy, and the love object is in stark relief from the surroundings. This is love, a pretty thing on an ugly street.

Help me,' Allison says, but she is soft-spoken, and everyone she loves is so far away.

This is how it is in life and love. In life and love we are with people for a while, and then we join other people, people we have not met, and we walk with them, and we leave behind all the things we used to be. Sometimes we leave people behind too... This happens everyday. Everyday this happens and scarcely anybody cares.

When do you learn that the world, like any diner worth its salt, is open twenty-four hours a day?

I want you to love me in particular.

It’s not the makeup and it’s not the way that you dance and this is like love too where there’s only one dancer who will win your contest that night and they are not particularly the best one

And when love is over when the diner of love seems closed from the outside you want all those hours back along with anything you left at the lover’s house and maybe a couple of things which aren’t technically yours on the grounds that you wasted a portion of your life and those hours have all gone southside.

We laughed the rest of the way, because the point of this story is, it is not the cookies. It is the love.

The window rattles without you, you bastard. The trees are the cause, rattling in the wind, you jerk, the wind scraping those leaves and twigs against my window. They'll keep doing this, you terrible husband, and slowly wear away our entire apartment building. I know all these facts about you and there is no longer any use for them. What will I do with your license plate number, and where you hid the key outside so we'd never get locked out of this shaky building? What good does it do me, your pants size and the blue cheese preference for dressing? Who opens the door in the morning now, and takes the newspaper out of the plastic bag when it rains? I'll never get back all the hours I was nice to your parents. I nudge my cherry tomatoes to the side of the plate, bastard, but no one is waiting there with a fork to eat them. I miss you and I love you, bastard bastard bastard, come and clean the onion skins out of the crisper and trim back the tree so I can sleep at night.

The movie was kickass, which was appropriate, because tonight it was called Kickass: The Movie.

You're a ghost! Eddie cried. You're empty and you have nothing inside you.

You can’t mind these things, you just can’t, for to dislike what makes a person human is to dislike all humans.

I love you so soundly and I will do anything to drag you forward.

It's one thing for forgive yourself a mistake. But if you knew it was a mistake at the time, how do you forgive yourself then?

This teaching job did not pay a lot of money, because, let's face it, nobody gives a flying fuck about education, but it was a temporary position.

All over the world are particular people, and you could be happy with probably five or six of them, eight if you're bisexual and everyone is.

You only love once and and then maybe not again. Not on a day like this. The rain, the rain, the rain.

Rain, the grade school teachers say, makes the trees and flowers grow, but we’re not trees and flowers, and so many grade school teachers are single.

You have to love the whole person, if you are truly in love.

She was all the world’s money, and I would spend it with her, my sharpest friend who changed the tide, my only comfort from the brutal gamble of the world and the wicked ways of men.

The clock in his car hadn't adjusted to daylight saving time yet and said it was four-fifteen when it was really five-fifteen. Peter probably didn't have time to fiddle with it, or it was tricky, as car clocks are. I didn't mind. You can't mind these things, you just can't, for to dislike what makes a person human is to dislike all humans, or at least other people who can't work clocks. You have to love the whole person, if you are truly in love. If you are going to take a lifelong journey with somebody, you can't mind if the other person believes they are leaving for that journey an hour earlier than you, as long as truly, in the real world, you are both leaving at exactly the same time.

Finders keepers is what they say, and I wanted to be kept.

All the deaths are dead for nothing but you're not dead at all.

He thought she knew what he meant, but the biggest mistake you can make is thinking they know what you mean.

The miracle is the adverbs. The way things are done.

Love makes the world go round, the hit songs collectively tell us, and the world is full of people you don't know and might as well be nice to because they won't leave.

Love is this sudden crash in your path, quick and to the point, and nearly always it leaves someone slain on the green.

This is love, and the trouble with it: it can make you embarrassed. Love is really liking someone a whole lot and not wanting to screw that up. Everybody's chewed this over. This unites us, this part of love.

No, when you love someone you spend hours and hours with them, and even the mightiest forces in the netherworld could not say whether the hours you spend increase your love or if you simply spend more hours with someone as your love increases.

You know how the nurses started asking me to rate my pain one to ten? I just started giving them random numbers. You can’t get to ten, I told the one with those earrings I want to yank out. You can’t get to ten because someone might slap you and that would hurt more.

There was a noise above us like an airplane zoom, but it was getting too dark to see. People started laying on the horn, braying like bad geese in a panic. "I am here," Lila said with a trembly smile. Our driver's ed teacher had told us that's what the horn should mean. Not Move along, buddy or I am displeased but I am here. I am here, I am here, I am here!

This is love, to sit with someone you’ve known forever in a place you’ve been meaning to go, and watching as their life happens to them until you stand up and it’s time to go. You don’t care about yours. Why should it change, the love you feel, no matter how death goes?

So she loved him. She just did, immediately and again, often and clearly, naturally and soundly and obviously and many others.

Love is really liking someone a whole lot and not wanting to screw that up.

Beautiful.

I know all these facts about you and there is no longer any use for them.

But more often the woman was alone and would walk around naked for some reason, neither beautiful enough nor ugly enough to make sense.

Another song,” Allison says. “The one by that band, from when I was in high school, that saved my life the way songs do.

Allison decided it was okay sort of like if you’re in a car and it topples off a hill you decide it’s okay to fall, too.

Nobody knows why men do things.

Someday we will all be dead people but in the meantime we have these problems to solve.

You don’t say,” Helena said. She took a cigarette out of her ripped purse and lit it because she smoked. She was a smoker.

How many happy people do you think there are in the world? Twelve?

This is what happens. You meet people who are in pain, in life and love, and you forgive them for behaving the way they do.

the world is full of people you don’t know and might as well be nice to because they won’t leave.

The street was a yellow streak, however many yards wide, cabs and cabs and cabs and the occasional car that wasn’t a cab so the whole thing looked like a scarcely-been-touched ear of corn.

You have to love the whole person, if you are truly in love. If you are going to take a lifelong journey with somebody, you can’t mind if the other person believes they are leaving for that journey an hour earlier than you, as long as truly, in the real world, you are both leaving at exactly the same time.

I won’t do a thing,” I said. “Without you I’m not moving.” Through the front window was another cliché, rain raging while the women inside wept like girls. The traffic screamed its emergency around us, but we could do this thing on our own. She was all the world’s money, and I would spend it with her, my sharpest friend who changed the tide, my only comfort from the brutal gamble of the world and the wicked ways of men. I grabbed her hands and clasped them together over her scar into a position of strength, like a prayer we wouldn’t be caught dead saying. Gather around us, heroic women of Haddam. Gather around us and put us under your silken wings. We are here, we are here, we are here, won’t someone take us across the sound together.

There are stories about people who have loved someone forever after laying eyes on them for a few minutes and then nevermore, but these stories have not happened to anyone we know. No, when you love someone you spend hours and hours with them, and even the mightiest forces in the netherworld could not say whether the hours you spend increase your love or if you simply spend more hours with someone as your love increases

Love is hourly, too. There are stories about people who have loved someone forever after laying eyes on them for a few minutes and then nevermore, but these stories have not happened to anyone we know. No, when you love someone you spend hours and hours with them, and even the mightiest forces in the netherworld could not say whether the hours you spend increase your love or if you simply spend more hours with someone as your love increases. And when the love is over, when the diner of love seems closed from the outside, you want all those hours back, along with anything you left at the lover's house and maybe a couple of things which aren't technically yours on the grounds that you wasted a portion of your life and those hours have all gone southside. Nobody can make this better, it seems, nothing on the menu. It's like what the stewardess offers, even in first class. They come with towels, with drinks, mints, but they never say, "Here's the five hours we took from you when you flew across the country to New York to live with your boyfriend and then one day he got in a taxicab and he never came back, and also you flew back, another five hours, to San Francisco, just in time for a catastrophe." And so you sit like a spilled drink, those missing hours in you like an ache, and you hear stories that aren't true and won't bring anyone back.

It is natural, this heartbreak which arrives first when you are young and never leaves your house no matter where you move, but still everyone wants the kid to stop the fussing and shut up.

This was like going grocery shopping and quitting the peas.

After a certain age you couldn’t even say where you were from. You went someplace, and lived there. And then you went someplace else.

Is it really possible to quit, and step out of a car that’s taking you someplace terrible?

Nobody keeps score, because there’s no sense in keeping track of what everyone is doing.

All over the world are particular people, and you could be happy with probably five or six of them, eight if you’re bisexual and everyone is.

Where’s my money? I’m very angry because I believe I am owed some money which you are preventing me from obtaining,

He had seen himself naked and so had quite a few other people, although some of them do not remember.

He sat on benches and tried to get in a spooky mood.

Even with the right boy I’d wreck it,” I said. “I’d join the navy on impulse and sail off right when he needed me, or we’d have a baby and I’d accidentally put it in my purse. The right boys I always toss and the wrong ones I keep on top of me like paperweights. I know they’re the wrong boys and I just go to them.

It’s one thing to forgive yourself a mistake. But if you knew it was a mistake at the time, how do you forgive yourself then?

This is love, to sit with someone you’ve known forever in a place you’ve been meaning to go, and watching as their life happens to them until you stand up and it’s time to go. You don’t care about yours.

You can say something and say something, but still nobody wants to hear it.

If you know what I mean it felt reckless, the rain and whatnot, but only if your idea of reckless is sitting at a diner and having whatever you felt like.

Don't break my heart just yet, or ask me to lose my reverie on the sticky floor... let me believe I'm the guy they all paid to watch all big and mighty, in the dark where I guess I belong.

Są ludzie, którzy powiedzieliby, że takie cuda czyni jedynie Bóg, ale nie w tej książce. (Bóg występuje tutaj tylko raz, jako starsza siostra w opowiadaniu Krótko, popijająca zwędzony rodzicom rum w wysokiej szklance i flirtująca z chłopcem, którego pragnie ktoś trzeci).

Cudem są przysłówki – to, jak coś się dzieje.

this world is suckier than we are, and the best thing to do is keep moving and find your keys.

Love is like this, plenty of places to sit but an overall feeling that the room needs a good uptight scrubbing until everything that mentions your mother has been washed away.

If you are going to take a lifelong journey with somebody, you can't mind if the other person believes they are leaving for that journey an hour earlier than you.

the dark as it hit late afternoon thick like someone who stops by your place and just won’t leave.

The chairs and tables stayed sticky, if you know what I mean. If you know what I mean there were five people inside the diner, plus a couple way off in the corner bickering together about something and the cook.

This teaching job did not pay a lot of money, because, let’s face it, nobody gives a flying fuck about education,

Why is there mean, when there are better things than mean, love particularly?

I want you to love me in particular,” Helena said. “I’m not the same as an American. I’m my own species and I want you to be picky about it, if that’s the expression.

I hereby demand that all people who are good at math make the world free of illness.

Love-is this something we can learn to do again, and if so, when will that time arrive, even on a bad day? When do you know when something is becoming something that changes you?