The Bad Beginning Quotes

If you have read this far in the chronicle of the Baudelaire orphans - and I certainly hope you have not - then you know we have reached the thirteenth chapter of the thirteenth volume in this sad history, and so you know the end is near, even though this chapter is so lengthy that you might never reach the end of it. But perhaps you do not yet know what the end really means. "The end" is a phrase which refers to the completion of a story, or the final moment of some accomplishment, such as a secret errand, or a great deal of research, and indeed this thirteenth volume marks the completion of my investigation into the Baudelaire case, which required much research, a great many secret errands, and the accomplishments of a number of my comrades, from a trolley driver to a botanical hybridization expert, with many, many typewriter repairpeople in between. But it cannot be said that The End contains the end of the Baudelaires' story, any more than The Bad Beginning contained its beginning. The children's story began long before that terrible day on Briny Beach, but there would have to be another volume to chronicle when the Baudelaires were born, and when their parents married, and who was playing the violin in the candlelit restaurant when the Baudelaire parents first laid eyes on one another, and what was hidden inside that violin, and the childhood of the man who orphaned the girl who put it there, and even then it could not be said that the Baudelaires' story had not begun, b ~ Lemony Snicket

They were charming and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery, and despair. ~ Lemony Snicket

What's wrong?" Lane ran his thumb over my cheek.

"I wish… I just…" I frowned, trying to find the words I wanted. "I want to go home. I want to go check on Iggy. I want this to be a really bad and really long nightmare. I wish that instead of being in the truck, we were on our couch. You'd be sitting with your legs stretched out and I'd be lying on your lap. We could watch a movie. We'd be having a beer and nachos… I'd kill for a fucking beer right now." I stopped my rambling to swallow down the lump forming in my throat.

"It will be okay." He pressed his lips to my forehead. "I don't know what the fuck is going on, but someone will figure it out and they'll find a way to fix it. We're safe here for now." He maneuvered over the shift stick settled himself beside me. I laid my head against his shoulder and closed my eyes as he smoothed my hair.

"Lane?"

"Hmmm?"

I looked up at him and raised a hand to touch his cheek. My heart skipped, my lips brushed over his, and I took a deep breath. I remembered all those times I'd told him, but at the same time hadn't told him. I decided that from now on, for whatever time we had left, he'd know.

"I love you, Lane. Always have."

His smile melted every bone in my body. "I love you, Gabrielle. Always will. ~ Meaka Kyel

Two monks were once travelling together down a wet and muddy road. The rain was torrential, making it almost impossible to walk along the path. As the two men were trudging along, a beautiful girl dressed in silk appeared. She was unable to cross the path and looked distressed.

"Let me help you", said the older monk. He picked her up and carried her over the mud. His younger male companion did not utter a word that night until they reached their lodging temple. Then after hours of restrained conversation, the younger monk exclaimed: "We monks do not touch females; it is too tempting for us and can create a bad outcome". The older monk looked into the younger monks eyes and said, "I left the girl on the road. Are you still carrying her?"

This ancient Zen story illustrates beautifully how so many of us are trapped in the habit of constantly "re-living" the past in our minds, thus dishonouring the present moment. The young monk wasted hours distressing himself with judgment, speculation, anxiety, resentment and ultimately self-perpetuated unhappiness as a direct result of not being mindful. ~ Christopher Dines

Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books. In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their figures perfect; there's no hiccoughing or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollections of unpaid bills or business letters unanswered, to interrupt the raptures. Art gives you the sensation, the thought, the feeling quite pure
chemically pure, I mean, ... not morally. ~ Aldous Huxley

The first view is "bad apple." Bad apple is excusable. It's sort of like, something went bad with this man. But the second option is police corruption, so it's a problem with the department. ~ Oren Moverman

When I first moved to Los Angeles, I had a really bad run. I would sleep in my car during the day outside the Disney building in Burbank, and that's where I got my first job, which is really weird. I liked to stay around the studios and kind of get the good vibes going. ~ Camille Guaty

You must define success as making the complete effort to maximize your ability, skills, and potential in whatever circumstances - good or bad - may exist. ~ John Wooden

This hell on earth is unlike anything that's ever taken place. Who knows when it will end, or if it ever will? We might all be in for a lot of pain in the near future, so we need to be strong and we need to stick together. There's no telling how bad things will get. ~ Jason Medina

My parents took an interest in nothing, at home no books, no records. My mother and my father are the emblem of indifference, dryness and bad taste. My father is also terribly stingy, in life as well as in feelings: I have never seen him filling up the bathtub. ~ Vincent Gallo

THERE WAS ALWAYS a boy in your life that common sense and the prayers of parents told you to stay away from: fast talker, fast car, and fast hands. He was the boy your father kept a loaded shotgun by the door for and met on the front porch if he ever thought about venturing onto his property ... let alone the threshold. He was the tall, dark, mysteriously handsome, and uncharacter-istically quiet one that made you wonder what was going on in his head, and that little voice in your head said it wasn't always so honorable. He was the boy you broke all of the rules over because bad-boys equaled excitement and the rebel in you liked the ride. ~ A.J. Lape

We have a choice. We can seek for the bad in others. Or we can make peace and work to extend to others the understanding, fairness, and forgiveness we so desperately desire for ourselves. It is our choice; for whatever we seek, that we will certainly find. ~ Dieter F. Uchtdorf

I was very lucky. Things happened, both bad and good, but I never got into real, deep trouble. But it wore me down. By the time I was 18, I was done. I didn't want to live the life any more. I needed to develop past the point that busking takes you to. ~ Madeleine Peyroux

How do we protect the soul of democracy against bad theology in service of an imperial state? ~ Bill Moyers

This was the move that was supposed to sweep me away. She seemed a little out of practice. I guess life with Charley Royce hadn't exactly been the third reel of The English Patient. It had to be bad if Mickey Dolan was your back-up. Not to put Mickey down but he didn't strike me as the lover-boy type. Especially when he took out his teeth. The last time Mickey thought about pleasing anybody but himself was just before he discovered how to sniff glue. ~ Dan Ahearn

The way British publishing works is that you go from not being published no matter how good you are, to being published no matter how bad you are. ~ Tibor Fischer

As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America. Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. ... Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. ~ Karl Marx

How many times have you tried to talk to someone about something that matters to you, tried to get them to see it the way you do? And how many of those times have ended with you feeling bitter, resenting them for making you feel like your pain doesn't have any substance after all?

Like when you've split up with someone, and you try to communicate the way you feel, because you need to say the words, need to feel that somebody understands just how pissed off and frightened you feel. The problem is, they never do. "Plenty more fish in the sea," they'll say, or "You're better off without them," or "Do you want some of these potato chips?" They never really understand, because they haven't been there, every day, every hour. They don't know the way things have been, the way that it's made you, the way it has structured your world. They'll never realise that someone who makes you feel bad may be the person you need most in the world. They don't understand the history, the background, don't know the pillars of memory that hold you up. Ultimately, they don't know you well enough, and they never can. Everyone's alone in their world, because everybody's life is different. You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live.

Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down. ~ Michael Marshall Smith

We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause. ~ William James

I think the only way one can really determine whether extremism in the defense of liberty is justified, is not to approach it as an american or a european or an African or an Asian, but as a human being. If we look upon it as different types immediately we begin to think in terms of extremism being good for one and bad for another, or bad for one and good for another. But if we look upon it, if we look upon ourselves as human beings, I doubt that anyone will deny that extremism, in defense of liberty, the liberty of any human being. ~ Malcolm X

The impact on a customer of a bad buying decision is usually greater than the impact of a salesperson of a lost deal. ~ Donal Daly

The highest good is like water, for the good of water is that it nourishes everything without striving. It occupies the place which all men think bad [i.e., the lowest level].17 [102d] It is thus that Tao in the world is like a river going down the valley to the ocean.18 [102e] The most gentle thing in the world overrides the most hard.19 [102g] How do coves and oceans become kings of a hundred rivers? Because they are good at keeping low - That is how they are kings of the hundred rivers.20 [102f] Nothing in the world is weaker than water, But it has no better in overcoming the hard.21 [101a] ~ Alan W. Watts

As a songwriter, I try not to be sloppy; same with the music. You can be very lean, very efficient, so you're not wasting a lot of time getting' to the point. You're saying it with as pure a word or phrase as you can. That's the part that was craft. You refine and refine and refine. Maybe that's why the songs still hang on, because they're very pure. For one thing, they're very short. "Bad Moon Rising" is like 2 minutes and 12 seconds. I would try to do everything as quickly and with as little extra as possible. It was a challenge. ~ John Fogerty

Nothing is more vital to him than prejudices. Let us not take this word in bad part. It does not necessarily signify false ideas, but only, in the strict sense of the word, any opinions adopted without examination. Now, these kinds of opinion are essential to man; they are the real basis of his happiness and the palladium of empires. Without them, there can be neither religion, morality, nor government. There should be a state religion just as there is a state political system; or rather, religion and political dogmas, mingled and merged together, should together form a general or national mind sufficiently strong to repress the aberrations of the individual reason which is, of its nature, the mortal enemy of any association whatever because it gives birth only to divergent opinions. ~ Joseph De Maistre

Torture is how you create enemies, not how you defeat them ... Torture is how you get bad information, not good intelligence. Torture is how you set back America's standing in the world, not how you strengthen it. ~ Barack Obama

In asking me to contribute a mite to the memorial to Gutenberg you give me pleasure and do me honor. The world concedes without hesitation or dispute that Gutenberg's invention is incomparably the mightiest event that has ever happened in profane history. It created a new and wonderful earth, and along with it a new hell. It has added new details, new developments and new marvels to both in every year during five centuries. It found Truth walking, and gave it a pair of wings; it found Falsehood trotting, and gave it two pair. It found Science hiding in corners and hunted; it has given it the freedom of the land, the seas and the skies, and made it the world's welcome quest. It found the arts and occupations few, it multiplies them every year. It found the inventor shunned and despised, it has made him great and given him the globe for his estate. It found religion a master and an oppression, it has made it man's friend and benefactor. It found War comparatively cheap but inefficient, it has made it dear but competent. It has set peoples free, and other peoples it has enslaved; it is the father and protector of human liberty, and it has made despotisms possible where they were not possible before. Whatever the world is, today, good and bad together, that is what Gutenberg's invention has made it: for from that source it has all come. But he has our homage; for what he said to the reproaching angel in his dream has come true, and the evil wrought through his mighty invention is ~ Mark Twain

For everyone nowadays knows, absolutely is CERTAIN, that nothing bad will ever happen to ME. Others die, I go on. There are no consequences and no responsibilities. Except that there ARE. But let's not talk about them, eh? By the time the consequences catch up to you, it's too late, isn't it, Montag? ~ Ray Bradbury

I wish I could tell you to always follow your heart, but I think it is bad advice. You have a heart, yes, it is true, but also a brain and also a soul. I've come to believe that we love with our brains as much as our hearts. Real Love is not just instinct, but intent ... From year to year, you may not always be the same Jane. This is perfectly normal. A Jane is many Janes in a lifetime. ~ Gabrielle Zevin

We are not as Christ-centered and cross-cherishing as we should be, because we do not ponder the truth that everything good, and everything bad that God turns for the good, was purchased by the sufferings of Christ. ~ John Piper

People have a bad habit of blaming the victims. Damn Jews! If hadn't been for them the Nazis wouldn't have exterminated 'em all! ~ Ward Churchill

We had many good directors - John Carpenter, Brian De Palma - but things have become polluted by business, money and bad relationships. The success of the horror genre has led to its downfall. ~ Dario Argento

You must fire bad customers just as you would fire a bad employee. If you do not get rid of your bad employees, the good employees will leave. If I do not fire bad customers, not only will my good customers leave but many of my good employees will leave as well. ~ Robert Kiyosaki