Top 300 Roald Dahl Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The maid screamed. The Queen gasped. Sophie waved.”

— Roald Dahl

102. “It’s impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren’t feeling twinkly yourself.”

— Roald Dahl

103. “A witch never gets caught. Don’t forget that she has magic in her fingers and devilry dancing in her blood.”

— Roald Dahl

104. “I’d rather be fried alive and eaten by Mexicans.”

— Roald Dahl

105. “Give us strength, oh Lord, to let our children starve.”

— Roald Dahl

106. “All through my school life I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed quite literally to wound other boys, and sometimes very severely.”

— Roald Dahl

107. “Books shouldn’t be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful.”

— Roald Dahl

108. “My dear young fellow,? the Old-Green-Grasshopper said gently, ’there are a whole lot of things in this world of ours you haven’t started wondering about yet.”

— Roald Dahl

109. “It was slowly beginning to dawn upon Henry that nothing is any fun if you can get as much of it as you want. Especially money.”

— Roald Dahl

110. “Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

— Roald Dahl

111. “When I was 2, we moved into an imposing country mansion 8 miles west of Cardiff, Wales.”

— Roald Dahl

112. “No-one got rich being honest, the customers have to be diddled.”

— Roald Dahl

113. “There’s someone over there needs a helping hand and it’s our job to give it.”

— Roald Dahl

114. “Well, maybe it started that way. As a dream, but doesn’t everything. Those buildings. These lights. This whole city. Somebody had to dream about it first. And maybe that is what I did. I dreamed about coming here, but then I did it.”

— Roald Dahl

115. “Homesickness is a bit like seasickness. You don’t know how awful it is unti you get it, and when you do, it hits you right in the top of the stomach and you want to die.”

— Roald Dahl

116. “Everyone is born. But not everyone is born the same. One way or another though, every human being is unique, for better or worse.”

— Roald Dahl

117. “Poppyrot and pigwash!”

— Roald Dahl

118. “There’s plenty of money out there. They print more every day. But this ticket, there’s only five of them in the whole world, and that’s all there’s ever going to be. Only a dummy would give this up for something as common money. Are you a dummy?”

— Roald Dahl

119. “Good strong hair,’ he was fond of saying, ‘means there’s a good strong brain underneath.’ ‘Like Shakespeare,’ Matilda had once said to him. ‘Like who?’ ‘Shakespeare, Daddy.’ ‘Was he brainy?’ ‘Very, Daddy.’ ‘He had masses of hair, did he?’ ‘He was bald, Daddy.”

— Roald Dahl

120. “Watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you.”

— Roald Dahl

121. “Sometimes Matilda longed for a friend, someone like the kind, courageous people in her books.”

— Roald Dahl

122. “And thus the journey ended. But the travelers lived on.”

— Roald Dahl

123. “Being very small and very young, the only power Matilda had over anyone in her family was brain-power.”

— Roald Dahl

124. “Don’t argue, my dear child, please don’t argue!” cried Mr. Wonka. “It’s such a waste of precious time!”

— Roald Dahl

125. “Now look at me,” Mrs Wormwood said. “Then look at you. You chose books. I chose looks.”

— Roald Dahl

126. “Of course they’re real people. They’re Oompa-Loompas... Imported direct from Loompaland... And oh what a terrible country it is! Nothing but thick jungles infested by the most dangerous beasts in the world – hornswogglers and snozzwangers and those terrible wicked whangdoodles. A whangdoodle would eat ten Oompa-Loompas for breakfast and come galloping back for a second helping.”

— Roald Dahl

127. “Badger: The cuss you are. Mr. Fox: The cuss am I? Are you cussing with me?”

— Roald Dahl

128. “I do have a blurred memory of sitting on the stairs and trying over and over again to tie one of my shoelaces, but that is all that comes back to me of school itself.”

— Roald Dahl

129. “A bad girl is a far more dangerous thing than a bad boy.”

— Roald Dahl

130. “If you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it.”

— Roald Dahl

131. “Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable.”

— Roald Dahl

132. “Of course not. You can’t have a family hanging over you like a bunch of old dead goats. No offense.”

— Roald Dahl

133. “I don’t want a grown-up person at all. A grownup won’t listen to me; he won’t learn. He will try to do things his own way and not mine. So I have to have a child. I want a good sensible loving child, one to whom I can tell all my most precious candy-making secrets-while I am still alive.”

— Roald Dahl

134. “A good plot is like a dream.”

— Roald Dahl

135. “The nastier the dream, the angrier it is getting when it is in prison,’ the BFG said.”

— Roald Dahl

136. “So the music is saying something to them. It is sending a message. I do not think the human beans is knowing what that message is, but they is loving it just the same.”

— Roald Dahl

137. “I is sometimes hearing faraway music coming from the stars in the sky.’ A.”

— Roald Dahl

138. “The children and their parents were too flabber-gasted to speak. They were staggered. They were dumbfounded. They were bewildered and dazzled. They were completely bowled over by the hugeness of the whole thing. They simply stood and stared.”

— Roald Dahl

139. “A man does not rise to become the Queen’s butler unless he is gifted with extraordinary ingenuity, adaptability, versatility, dexterity, cunning, sophistication, sagacity, discretion, and a host of other talents than neither you nor I possess. Mr Tibbs had them all.”

— Roald Dahl

140. “Had I not had children of my own, I would have never written books for children, nor would I have been capable of doing so.”

— Roald Dahl

141. “The Bristol Channel was always my guide, and I was always able to draw an imaginary line from my bed to our house over in Wales. It was a great comfort.”

— Roald Dahl

142. “The only sensible thing to do when you are attacked is, as Napoleon once said, to counter-attack.”

— Roald Dahl

143. “However small the chance might be of striking lucky, the chance was there.”

— Roald Dahl

144. “If I were a headmaster, I would get rid of the history teacher and get a chocolate teacher instead and my pupils would study a subject that affected all of them.”

— Roald Dahl

145. “Mr. Bucket was the only person in the family with a job. He worked in a toothpaste factory, where he sat all day long at a bench and screwed the little caps onto the tops of the tubes of toothpaste after the tubes had been filled.”

— Roald Dahl

146. “These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.”

— Roald Dahl

147. “Most of the really exciting things we do in our lives scare us to death. They wouldn’t be exciting if they didn’t.”

— Roald Dahl

148. “Matilda had never once stopped to think about where Miss Honey might be living. She had always regarded her purely as a teacher, a person who turned up out of nowhere and taught at school and then went away again. Do any of us children, she wondered, ever stop to ask ourselves where our teachers go when school is over for the day? Do we wonder if they live alone, or if there is a mother at home or a sister or a husband?”

— Roald Dahl

149. “Never in a pig’s whistle!’ cried the BFG.”

— Roald Dahl

150. “We are all a great deal luckier that we realize, we usually get what we want – or near enough.”

— Roald Dahl