Also,” Nick added curtly, “I’m sorry about your face.”Jamie looked over his shoulder, and touched the demon’s mark crawling along his jaw with the back of his hand. “Sorry about saving all our lives by doing something you had to do?””Oh no,” Nick said blandly, “I just meant, you know. Generally.”Jamie stared at him, shocked,...

Stop that!” Do not mention this when you answer his letter, however. It is quite controversial and Mrs. Mandell is a poet besides.

I suddenly remembered that Murray Gell-Mann and I were supposed to give talks at that conference on the present situation of high-energy physics. My talk was set for the plenary session, so I asked the guide, “Sir, where would the talks for the plenary session of the conference be?””Back in that room that we just...

H.L. Mencken once said that Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be having a good time. As she looked down at her dead child, Mary Beth realized that the unbearable sense of loss she felt was tempered by gratitude and a kind of relief. There would be no more boyfriends now, no...

You see, insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops.

The taxi driver felt that it was a good observation, and said he was planning to build for the future, too: he had some money on the horses, and if he won, he would buy his own taxicab, and really do well.I felt very sorry. I told him that betting on the horses was a...

His hatred for all was so intense that it should extinguish the very love from which it was conceived. And thus, he ceased to feel. There was nothing further in which to believe that made the prospect of feeling worthwhile. Daily he woke up and cast downtrodden eyes upon the sea and he would say...

He quite liked dentists’ waiting rooms. Waiting for dentists was good. Waiting for them was so much better than having them stick metal spikes in your mouth.

The most I can hope for is to die in a pose that confuses future archaeologists.

Princess Cookie’s cognitive pathways may have required a more comprehensive analysis. He knew that it was possible to employ certain progressive methods of neural interface, but he felt somewhat apprehensive about implementing them, for fear of the risks involved and of the limited returns such tactics might yield. For instance, it would be a particularly...

I’m afraid it’s not nonsense,” Genghis said, shaking his turbaned head and continuing his story. “As I was saying before the little girl interrupted me, the baby didn’t dash off with the other orphans. She just sat there like a sack of flour. So I walked over to her and gave her a kick to...

I could think of no better place to secretly murder someone than inside a fridge. Well, actually there were probably several better ones, but none came to mind at the time.

What’s wrong with you, Daniel? How can you laugh about these things?” And I’m like, ‘Cause crying only gets you halfway there, duh.

The Baudelaire orphans hung on to one another, and wept and wept while the adults argued endlessly behind them. Finally-as, I’m sorry to say, Count Olaf forced the Quagmires into puppy costumes so he could sneak them onto the airplane without anyone noticing-the Baudelaires cried themselves out and just sat on the lawn together in...

This was how I would die. Strangled by an attractive, seminaked woman inside a fridge with a giant tarantula in the middle of a sea of carnivorous jam. As I blacked out, all I could think of was a fortune teller I’d spoken to a few years ago, and how full of shit she’d turned...

Akthent on thee latht thyllable.

Yet you believe those things won’t come if you serve your Lord? You know what they say about the road to Hell, Judas.

Arts degrees are awesome. And they help you find meaning where there is none. And let me assure you, there is none. Don’t go looking for it. Searching for meaning is like searching for a rhyme scheme in a cookbook: you won’t find it and you’ll bugger up your soufflé.

… a man doesn’t like to have his ego popped, especially when he prides himself on his sagacity, and then to be proved wrong by a man who claims he doesn’t know anything.

When he picked out the [gravesite] plot, my father had joked that he was moving, at last, to the suburbs.

I don’t know what it is about “magic happens”-stickers on cars but every time I see one I wanna get out my permanent marker and sneak over and write underneath it “so does cot death”.

He could see her planting violets on his grave, a solitary figure in a grey cloak. What a ghastly tragedy. A lump came to his throat. He became quite emotional thinking of his own death. He would have to write a poem about this. –from a Difference in Temperament

Al, where are you going to put her? Not in your room. She’d pull a line through you and kill you when you hog the blankets. I’ll take the waif in. I promise I’ll bring this one up properly.

Well, it was fair when you were sending all the Chinese to Hell who had never heard of Jesus. Wasn’t it?

Neighbours complaining about someone’s dog making an awful racket. You could hardly blame the poor beast, its owner had died in her bed at least a fortnight before and there hadn’t been much left of the old girl worth eating.

Magic is a naughty beast.

Remember you are never really alone. Although it may feel like it for very long stretches of time.

Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950’s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.

Snow came back, but she didn’t come back right.

What would you think of an engineer who expounded the art of flying without revealing the secrets of the engine and propeller? That’s what you do, you engineer of the human soul. Just that. You’re a coward. You want the raisins out of my cake but you don’t want the thorns of my roses. Haven’t...

I believe in the salvation of humanity, in the future of cyanide…