The Slippery Slope (Lemony Snicket)

In the tenth book of A Series of Unfortunate Events, the Baudelaire orphans decide to check and contain the moral ambiguity that has plagued their actions since at least book 8 (The Vile Village). In a decisive moment, Violet realizes that if everyone fought fire with fire, the entire world would go up in smoke. Fighting fire with fire, incidentally, is the motto and the chosen method of their enemies (the villains), and in this book, the orphans start calling themselves volunteers, aligning with the good side of VFD. At the end of the book, they are not victims anymore, but fighters.

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Quotes:



For Beatrice --
When we met, you were pretty, and I was lonely.
Now, I am pretty lonely.


Having an aura of menace is like having a pet weasel, because you rarely meet someone who has one, and when you do it makes you want to hide under the coffee table.

"Busheney," Sunny said, which meant something along the lines of, "You're an evil man with no concern whatsoever for other people."

The world is quiet here. (Volunteers' motto)

We'll fight fire with fire! (Villains motto)

If everyone fought fire with fire, the entire world would go up in smoke. (Violet)

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. (Klaus, quoting a book by a famous philosopher he read (Nietzsche)).

"The Itsy Bitsy Spider" [...] is one of the saddest songs ever composed. It tells the story of a small spider who is trying to climb up a water spout, but every time its climb is half over, there is a great burst of water, either due to rain or somebody turning the spout on, and at the end of the song, the spider has decided to try one more time, and will likely be washed away once again.