Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) Sentence Starters
Change pronouns as needed!
“I’m afraid I must inform you of an extremely unfortunate event.”
“If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels. But if you haven’t, you cannot possibly imagine it.”
“I tried to warn you.”
“Let’s sleep outside.”
“Your left side is the good one.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t speak monkey. Ba-na-na?”
“Our parents just died.”
“I will raise these ____ as if they were actually wanted.”
“I trust you’ve had your tetanus shots. Polio, smallpox, typhoid, malaria… ”
“I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but first impressions are often entirely wrong.”
“And I realized these cover girls had stolen my kidney. Imagine my surprise!”
“Beef. Yes. Roast beef. It’s the Swedish term for beef that is roasted.”
“Back off, parrot face!!”
“Home is where your parents put you to bed at night. Where they teach you to ride a bike or where they get all choked up on your first day of school. This is not home.”
“They’re just bad people.”
“Do you think anything will ever feel like home again?”
“Custody granted.”
“I’m going to get you no matter where you go, no matter what you do, I will FIND you!”
“____. You look so much like your dear mother/father.”
“Do you know snakes are more afraid of you than you are of them?”
“I may know better than anyone what you’re going through.”
“Oops, you caught me being a mentor.”
“I’ve been bitten forty-three…seven…hundred times. Mostly on the face.”
“You can’t be buying this.”
“Children are strange and foreign to me. I never really was one.”
“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. It’s like walking upstairs to your bedroom in the dark and thinking that there’s one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise.”
“Does it strike you as odd that none of our relatives are related to us?”
“Grammar is the greatest joy in life, don’t you find?”
“I was quite adventurous when ____ was alive.”
“I’m afraid of realtors.”
“We’ve gotta get her out of the house.”
“Well, you can certainly turn a phrase.”
“She’s not dead. She’s hiding.”
“They won’t listen. They never listen.”
“It is one thing to do something in theory; another to do it in practice.”
“There are good people and bad people in the world. The ones who start the fires and the ones who put them out.”
“I hardly think that anybody is going to believe a dead man/woman.”
“Quiet, child. The adults are talking.”
“You have proven yourself to be an exceptionally capable guardian.”
“Look it up, Bookworm.”
“You’re ____ years old. You should know by now that you can’t have everything you want.”
“You want a life of happiness? A roof over you head? A place to call your own and all that jazz? And what about what I want?”
“You’re going to help me get what I want.”
“There’s always something. There’s always something.”
“I didn’t know they had this kind of budget.”
“Don’t look down. Don’t look down.”
“These things don’t just happen.”
“No one ever listens to children.”
“At times, the world can seem an unfriendly and sinister place. But believe us when we say that there is much more good in it than bad.”
“As long as you have each other, you have your family. And you are home.”













