Top 300 Roald Dahl Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I was a fighter pilot, flying Hurricanes all round the Mediterranean. I flew in the Western Desert of Libya, in Greece, in Syria, in Iraq and in Egypt.”

— Roald Dahl

152. “Oh, books, what books they used to know, Those children living long ago! So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install A lovely bookshelf on the wall.”

— Roald Dahl

153. “It was one of those golden autumn afternoons and there were blackberries and splashes of old man’s beard in the hedges, and the hawthorn berries were ripening scarlet for the birds when the cold winter came along. There were tall trees here and there on either side, oak and sycamore and ash and occasionally a sweet chestnut.”

— Roald Dahl

154. “Whips!” cried Veruca Salt. “What on earth do you use whips for?” “For whipping cream, of course,” said Mr. Wonka. “How can you whip cream without whips? Whipped cream isn’t whipped cream at all unless it’s been whipped with whips. Just as a poached egg isn’t a poached egg unless it’s been stolen from the woods in the dead of night! Row on, please!” They.”

— Roald Dahl

155. “The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives... All the reading she had done had given her a view of life that they had never seen.”

— Roald Dahl

156. “I look and smell,’ Aunt Sponge declared, ’as lovely as a rose!”

— Roald Dahl

157. “When Bruce Bogtrotter had eaten his way through half of the entire enormous cake, he paused for just a couple of seconds and took several deep breaths.”

— Roald Dahl

158. “Never in a month of Mondays.”

— Roald Dahl

159. “I, Willy Wonka, have decided to allow five children – just five, mind you, and no more – to visit my factory this year.”

— Roald Dahl

160. “I’ve always said to myself that if a little pocket calculator can do it why shouldn’t I?”

— Roald Dahl

161. “Pear Drops were exciting because they had a dangerous taste. All of us were warned against eating them, and the result was that we ate them more than ever.”

— Roald Dahl

162. “It is very difficult to phone people in China, Mr. President,” said the Postmaster General. “The country’s so full of Wings and Wongs, every time you wing you get the wong number.”

— Roald Dahl

163. “There is nothing more tantalizing than a thing like this which lingers just outside the borders of one’s memory.”

— Roald Dahl

164. “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.”

— Roald Dahl

165. “Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install A lovely bookshelf on the wall.”

— Roald Dahl

166. “She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.”

— Roald Dahl

167. “And Matilda found, to her surprise, that life could be fun. She decided to have as much fun as possible. After all, she was a very smart kid.”

— Roald Dahl

168. “I want an Oompa-Loompa!? screamed Veruca.”

— Roald Dahl

169. “Her face, I’m afraid, was neither a thing of beauty nor a joy for ever.”

— Roald Dahl

170. “That’s why they always put two blank pages at the back of the atlas. They’re for new countries. You’re meant to fill them in yourself.”

— Roald Dahl

171. “I am certainly anti-Israel, and I have become anti-Semitic.”

— Roald Dahl

172. “Human beans is killing each other much quicker than the giants is doing it.’ ‘But they don’t eat each other,’ Sophie said. ‘Giants isn’t eating each other either,’ the BFG said. ‘Nor is giants killing each other. Giants is not very lovely, but they is not killing each other.”

— Roald Dahl

173. “I was glad my father was an eye-smiler. It meant he never gave me a fake smile because it’s impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren’t feeling twinkly yourself. A mouth-smile is different. You can fake a mouth-smile any time you want, simply by moving your lips. I’ve also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it. So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you but his eyes stay the same. It’s sure to be a phony.”

— Roald Dahl

174. “The walls were wet and sticky, and peach juice was dripping from the ceiling. James opened his mouth and caught some of it on his tongue. It tasted delicious.”

— Roald Dahl

175. “This is Mr. Bucket. This is Mrs. Bucket. Mr. and Mrs. Bucket have a small boy whose name is Charlie Bucket.”

— Roald Dahl

176. “The only meals they could afford were bread and margarine for breakfast, boiled potatoes and cabbage for lunch, and cabbage soup for supper.”

— Roald Dahl

177. “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.”

— Roald Dahl

178. “The snozberries taste like snozberries!”

— Roald Dahl

179. “Sophie took the book out of his hand. ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ she read aloud. ‘By Dahl’s Chickens,’ the BFG said. ‘By who?’ Sophie said.”

— Roald Dahl

180. “Titchy little snapperwhippers like you should not be higgling around with an old sage and onions who is hundreds of years more than you.”

— Roald Dahl

181. “Everything and all of them were being rattled around like peas inside an enormous rattle that was being rattled by a mad giant who refused to stop.”

— Roald Dahl

182. “All Norwegian children learn to swim when they are very young because if you can’t swim it is difficult to find a place to bathe.”

— Roald Dahl

183. “Everybody was feeling happy now. The sun was shining brightly out of a soft blue sky and the day was calm. The giant peach, with the sunlight glinting on its side, was like a massive golden ball sailing upon a silver sea.”

— Roald Dahl

184. “An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.”

— Roald Dahl

185. “The romance, alas, waned and withered but the quiche lived on.”

— Roald Dahl

186. “We are now about to visit the most marvelous places and see the most wonderful things!”

— Roald Dahl

187. “Get up at once, you lazy little beast!”

— Roald Dahl

188. “It is almost worth going away because it’s so lovely coming back.”

— Roald Dahl

189. “You ignorant little slug!” the Trunchbull bellowed. “You witless weed! You empty-headed hamster! You stupid glob of glue!”

— Roald Dahl

190. “Mr. Twit was a twit. He was born a twit. And, now at the age of sixty, he was a bigger twit than ever.”

— Roald Dahl

191. “Frobscottle is sweet and jumbly!”

— Roald Dahl

192. “The very rich are enormously resentful of bad weather. It is the one discomfort that their money cannot do anything about.”

— Roald Dahl

193. “Human beans is the only animals that is killing their own kind.”

— Roald Dahl

194. “It was a very beautiful thing, this Golden Ticket, having been made, so it seemed, from a sheet of pure gold hammered out almost to the thinness of paper. On one side of it, printed by some clever method in jet-black letters, was the invitation itself – from Mr. Wonka.”

— Roald Dahl

195. “Dear children far across the sea, How nice of you to write to me. I love to hear the things you say When you are miles and miles away. All children, and I think I’m right, Are nicer when they’re out of sight!”

— Roald Dahl

196. “What a fortunate fellow I am, I kept telling myself. Nobody has ever had such a lovely time as this!”

— Roald Dahl

197. “A rowdy little girl who gave way upon the slightest provocation to uncontrollable laughter.”

— Roald Dahl

198. “Their skin hung loose over their bodies like suits they had inherited from larger ancestors, with the trousers ridiculously baggy.”

— Roald Dahl

199. “The matter with human beans,” the BFG went on, “is that they is absolutely refusing to believe in anything unless they is actually seeing it right in front of their own schnozzles.”

— Roald Dahl

200. “Sawdust in the gear-boxes, the electric-drill on the speedometer cables.”

— Roald Dahl