Цитаты из книги The Bad Beginning

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 for joy, for instance, it means you are leaping in the air because you are very happy. If you are figuratively jumping for joy, it means you are so happy that you could jump for joy, but are saving your energy for other matters.

"...Если вам доводилось терять кого-то очень близкого, без кого никак не обойтись, то вы уже знаете, каково это, а если не доводилось, тогда всё равно этого не представить..."

I am certain that over the course of your own life, you have noticed that people’s rooms reflect their personalities. In my room, for instance, I have gathered a collection of objects that are important to me, including a dusty accordion on which I can play a few sad songs, a large bundle of notes on the activities of the Baudelaire orphans, and a blurry photograph, taken a very long time ago, of a woman whose name is Beatrice.

The really frightening thing about Olaf, she realized, was that he was very smart after all.

Figuratively, they escaped from Count Olaf and their miserable existence. They did not literally escape, because they were still in his house and vulnerable to Olaf’s evil in loco parentis ways. But by immersing themselves in their favorite reading topics, they felt far away from their predicament, as if they had escaped

“Whatever Count Olaf has done,” Mr. Poe said, glancing down at one of his papers and circling a number, “he has acted in loco parentis, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Your money will be well protected by myself and by the bank, but Count Olaf’s parenting techniques are his own business. Now, I hate to usher you out posthaste, but I have very much work to do.”

“I suppose we will eat their dinner, even though it is all wrong. Everyone, follow me to the dining room and I will pour us some wine. Perhaps by the time these brats serve us, we will be too drunk to care if it is roast beef or not.”

The smell of cooking food is often a calming one, and the kitchen grew cozy as the sauce simmered, a culinary term which means “cooked over low heat.”

“None of us knows how to cook,” Klaus said. “That’s true,” Violet said. “I knew how to repair those windows, and how to clean the chimney, because those sorts of things interest me. But I don’t know how to cook anything except toast.” “And sometimes you burn the toast,” Klaus said, and they smiled.

Klaus found he had little interest in books. The gears in Violet’s inventive brain seemed to stop. And even Sunny, who of course was too young to really understand what was going on, bit things with less enthusiasm.

Violet had a real knack for inventing and building strange devices, so her brain was often filled with images of pulleys, levers, and gears, and she never wanted to be distracted by something as trivial as her hair.

If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.

Они читали каждый свою книжку,и у них крепла надежда,что скоро их фигуральное спасение превратится в буквальное.

The smell of cooking food is often a calming one...

but it is a sad truth in life that when someone has lost a loved one, friends sometimes avoid the person, just when the presence of friends is most needed.

the worst surroundings in the world can be tolerated if the people in them are interesting and kind.

... с несчастьями часто так: понимай, не понимай – дело не меняется.

As I’m sure you know, to be in one’s own room, in one’s own bed, can often make a bleak situation a little better...

If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels, and if you haven’t, you cannot possibly imagine it.