Roald Dahl Quotes

It's impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren't feeling twinkly yourself

I was already beginning to realize that the only way to conduct oneself in a situation where bombs rained down and bullets whizzed past, was to accept the dangers and all the consequences as calmly as possible. Fretting and sweating about it all was not going to help.

I is reading it hundreds of times,' the BFG said. 'And I is still reading it and teaching new words to myself and how to write them. It is the most scrumdiddlyumptious story.'

Sophie took the book out of his hand. 'Nicholas Nickleby,' she read aloud.

'By Dahl's Chickens,' the BFG said.

We all have our moments of brilliance and glory, and this was mine.

I'm right and you're wrong, I'm big and you're small, and there's nothing you can do about it.

I'd rather be fried alive and eaten by Mexicans.

For whipping cream, of course. How can you whip cream without whips?

The maid screamed.
The Queen gasped.
Sophie waved.

Obscurity is never a virtue.

"How long does a mouse live?"

"Ah," she said. "I've been waiting for you to ask me that."

There was a silence. She sat there smoking away and gazing at the fire.

"Well," I said. "How long do we live, us mice?"

"I have been reading about mice," she said. "I have been trying to find out everything I can about them."

"Go on then, Grandmamma. Why don't you tell me?"

"If you really want to know," she said, "I'm afraid a mouse doesn't live for a very long time."

"How long?" I asked.

"Well, an ordinary mouse only lives for about three years," she said. "But you are not an ordinary mouse. You are a mouse-person, and that is a very different matter."

"How different?" I asked. "How long does a mouse-person live, Grandmamma?"

"Longer," she said. "Much longer."

"A mouse-person will almost certainly live for three times as long as an ordinary mouse," my grandmother said. "About nine years."

"Good!" I cried. "That's great! It's the best news I've ever had!"

"Why do you say that?" she asked, surprised.

"Because I would never want to live longer than you," I said. "I couldn't stand being looked after by anybody else."

There was a short silence. She had a way of fondling me behind the ears with the tip of one finger. It felt lovely.

"How old are you, Grandmamma?" I asked.

"I'm eighty-six," she said.

"Will you live another eight or nine years?"

"I might," she said. "With a bit of luck."

"You've got to," I said. "Because by then I'll be a very old mouse and you'll be a very old grandmother and soon after that we'll both die together."

"That would be perfect," she said.

When you're writing, it's rather like going on a very long walk

Do you wonder then that this man’s behaviour used to puzzle me tremendously? He was an ordinary clergyman at that time as well as being Headmaster, and I would sit in the dim light of the school chapel and listen to him preaching about the Lamb of God and about Mercy and Forgiveness and all the rest of it and my young mind would become totally confused. I knew very well that only the night before this preacher had shown neither Forgiveness nor Mercy in flogging some small boy who had broken the rules.
So what was it all about? I used to ask myself.
Did they preach one thing and practise another, these men of God?
And if someone had told me at the time that this flogging clergyman was one day to become the Archbishop of Canterbury, I would never have believed it.
It was all this, I think, that made me begin to have doubts about religion and even about God. If this person, I kept telling myself, was one of God’s chosen salesmen on earth, then there must be something very wrong about the whole business.

He turned and reached behind him for the chocolate bar, then he turned back again and handed it to Charlie. Charlie grabbed it and quickly tore off the wrapper and took an enormous bite. Then he took another…and another…and oh, the joy of being able to cram large pieces of something sweet and solid into one's mouth! The sheer blissful joy of being able to fill one's mouth with rich solid food!
'You look like you wanted that one, sonny,' the shopkeeper said pleasantly.

Charlie nodded, his mouth bulging with chocolate.

I is not understanding human beans at all,’ the BFG said. ‘You is a human bean and you is saying it is grizzling and horrigust for giants to be eating human beans. Right or left?’ ‘Right,’ Sophie said. ‘But human beans is squishing each other all the time,’ the BFG said. ‘They is shootling guns and going up in aerioplanes to drop their bombs on each other’s heads every week. Human beans is always killing other human beans.’ He was right. Of course he was right and Sophie knew it. She was beginning to wonder whether humans were actually any better than giants.

"A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.”