20th Century British Poets

"The poor old creature seemed now indeed like someone being drawn, lured, into events of which he has no real comprehension, by people with whom he wishes to be friendly, even to play, who entice him by encouraging that wish and by whom, because they really despise and desire to humilate him, he is finally entangled."

"There was no callousness in their faces, no cruelty. Death they knew, better than the law, and their memories were long. They sat ranked now, motionless, frozen, discussing nothing, without a word, turned to stone. It was natural to have left the matter to the men. And yet, in these old women it was as if, through the various tragedies of Mexican history, pity, the impulse to approach, and terror, the impulse to escape (as one had learned at college), having replaced it, had finally been reconciled by prudence, the conviction it is better to stay where you are."

"And how could he know whether it was a good omen or not without another drink?"

"Yes, I do love you, I have all the love in the world left for you, only that love seems so far away from me and so strange too, for it is as though I could almost hear it, a droning or weeping, but far, far away, and a sad lost sound, it might be either approaching or receding, I can’t tell which."

"In the war to come correspondents would assume unheard of importance, plunging through flame to feed the public its little gobbets of dehydrated excrement."

"He had peered out at the garden, and it was as though bits of his eyelids had broken off and were flittering and jittering before him, turning into nervous shapes and shadows, jumping to the guilty chattering in his mind, not quite voices yet, but they were coming back, they were coming back; a picture of his soul as a town appeared once more before him, but this time a town ravaged and stricken in the black path of his excess and shutting his burning eyes he had thought of the beautiful functioning of the system in those who were truly alive, switches connected, nerves rigid only in real danger, and in nightmareless sleep now calm, not resting, yet poised: a peaceful village."

"In the final analysis there was no one you could trust to drink with you to the bottom of the bowl."

"There was something in the wild strength of this landscape, once a battlefield, that seemed to be shouting at him, a presence born of that strength whose cry his whole being recognized as familiar, caught and threw back into the wind, some youthful passage of courage and pride — the passionate, yet so nearly always hypocritical, affirmation of one’s soul perhaps, he thought, of the desire to be, to do, good, what was right."

"The will of man is unconquerable. Even God cannot conquer it."

"Nothing in the world was more terrible than an empty bottle! Unless it was an empty glass."

"But my lord, Yvonne, surely you know by this time I can’t get drunk however much I drink."

"How shall the murdered man convince his assassin he will not haunt him."

"For a time they confronted each other like two mute unspeaking forts."

"What beauty can compare to that of a cantina in the early morning?"

"And this is how I sometimes think of myself, as a great explorer who has discovered some extraordinary land from which he can never return to give his knowledge to the world: but the name of this land is hell."

"The howling pariah dogs, the cocks that herald dawn all night, the drumming, the moaning that will be found later white plumage huddled on telegraph wires in back gardens or fowl roosting in apple trees, the eternal sorrow that never sleeps of great Mexico."

"There was no mistaking, even in the uncertain light, the hand, half crabbed, half generous, and wholly drunken, of the Consul himself, the Greek e’s, the flying buttresses of d’s, the t’s like lonely wayside crosses save where they crucified an entire word."

"Though tragedy was in the process of becoming unreal and meaningless it seemed one was still permitted to remember the days when an individual life held some value and was not a mere misprint in a communiqué."

"One right is not making two lefts."

"When it comes to our rich and varied literary heritage, the prime minister agrees with the BFG that we shouldn’t gobblefunk around with words. I think it's important that works of literature and works of fiction are preserved and not airbrushed. We have always defended the right to free speech and expression."

"He was a self confessed antisemite, with pronounced racist leanings, and he joined in the attack on me back in 1989 ... but thanks for telling me off for defending his work from the bowdlerizing Sensitivity Police."

"Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed."

"Daughter and son became gleeful co-conspirators (and devout readers) of this remarkable writer, a World War II fighter pilot who once, having suffered a fractured skull in a crash, crawled away from the burning wreckage of his aircraft in a hail of machine-gun fire unleashed by the heat. After that, you could surely forgive Dahl a certain impatience with polite, adult society, and a mockingly macabre attitude to life, and death. No such tolerance is to be extended, however, by po-faced Puffin. The publisher, for whom Dahl continues to make a fortune, has unleashed "sensitivity readers" – the cultural vandals formerly known as "censors" – on his work. As the Telegraph revealed, hundreds of changes have been made in Dahl's books despite ample evidence that millions of kids have grown up pretty well after being exposed to the trauma of words such as "ladies and gentlemen" (now rendered as "folks". Ugh), "fat", "hag" and "black" (even when it's the colour of a tractor, not a person, bizarrely)."

"A few edits, though, are so contrary to the spirit of Dahl that they feel like a violation. In The Witches, for example, the protagonist's grandmother warns him to watch out for the evil women who rule the world. They are bald, and cover this up with wigs, as well as hiding their claws under gloves. The grandmother used to say: "You can't go round pulling the hair of every lady you meet, even if she is wearing gloves. Just you try it and see what happens." Instead, in the 2022 Puffin edition, she warns the youngster that "there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.""

"When I think back over the most memorable parts of Dahl's work, it’s always the nastiness that lingers. ... The awful married couple at the center of The Twits subject each other to a campaign of relentless psychological harassment. The message of George’s Marvelous Medicine is "Why not brew up all the chemicals you can find in your house and feed the resulting concoction to your grandmother?" This is not an easy fit for an era when peanut packets carry a warning that they contain nuts."

"In the original text of Matilda, there is a fantasy section where the heroine "goes on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway, and India with Rudyard Kipling." That has now been changed, so that Matilda goes to "nineteenth century estates with Jane Austen. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway, and California with John Steinbeck." I know why these have been changed. Austen is there so the authorial names aren't all men, and Kipling has been swapped for Steinbeck, as Rudyard is associated with British colonialism. But here’s the problem. Nineteenth century estates, like the ones Austen wrote about, were mainly financed by the slave trade. John Steinbeck has been portrayed as a violent misogynist by his first wife. And Hemingway, who survived the sensitivity edit, was also a misogynist, and a mad trophy-hunter of magnificent wild animals. Oh, and by the way, a writer who describes a central character in The Sun Also Rises, as a "rich Jew" and a "kike". Point being, if you dig deep enough, everyone, especially great writers and artists, is problematic. But in a universe where – sorry to say it - Jews don't count, some problems are, it seems bigger than others. These good progressive people making these edits deleting Kipling and Conrad because of their historically sinful associations are doing so to buff up the legacy of – I’m going to put this in italics - Roald Dahl."

"My mother is English, and as she was the one who read to us, my early world was A. A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl. None of them thought it necessary to protect children from darkness. On the contrary, they guided their readers right toward it. This gives one an enormous sense of being respected as a child. Not just of being trusted to handle things as they are, but to be accepted as not entirely good. To be recognized as having darkness within oneself, too."

"No matter how you spin it – and at times Donald Sturrock spins quite hard – Roald Dahl was an absolute sod. Crashing through life like a big, bad child he managed to alienate pretty much everyone he ever met with his grandiosity, dishonesty and spite. Tempered by the desire to be very wealthy, he was able to finesse this native nastiness into a series of compelling books for children who loved to see their anarchic inner world caught on paper."

"The Dahl family and the Roald Dahl Story Company deeply apologise for the lasting and understandable hurt caused by some of Roald Dahl's statements. Those prejudiced remarks are incomprehensible to us and stand in marked contrast to the man we knew and to the values at the heart of Roald Dahl's stories, which have positively impacted young people for generations. We hope that, just as he did at his best, at his absolute worst, Roald Dahl can help remind us of the lasting impact of words."

"There was never any apology from Dahl, clearly because he thought that there was nothing to be sorry about. The paragraph of contrition on his official website took a very long time to come, and while my interview has been quoted every few years, Dahl’s reputation has hardly been trashed."

"[After his comments to Michael Coren in the 1983 interview cited above] Firmly but not rudely I told him that my father was Jewish, that my grandfather had won all sorts of medals in North Africa and Europe, that Jews fought in enormous numbers in all of the Allied armies, were often over- rather than under-represented, and that this slimy canard of Jewish cowardice was beneath him. At which point he coughed, mumbled something about "sticking together", and then promptly ended the interview."

"[Initially referring to Dahl's attitude towards Jews.] This raises the question whether this is a man whose fictions should be allowed into our children's minds. But the point is that, as he hides himself away in his hit to play with the slapstick-horrific side of a child's imagination, he also sloughs off the world. Israel, his own life, modern novelists all slip away, leaving him to create in peace and innocence. He says he does not even observe his four grand children for inspiration — it all comes over him in the hut. But this dissociation is not as neat as Dahl would like to believe. His own childhood traumas and adult misanthropy are all too obviously present in the books — passages from his autobiography read precisely like one of his stories. Life and Dahl's art do walk hand in hand, even if he has no desire or obligation to ponder the fact. The stories are not the detached fantasies he imagines. They are anti-authoritarian tracts. And the truth is that Dahl himself should disapprove of his own books, for all his attitudes are those of a hard authoritarian, disgusted by indiscipline, television and all the other seductions of the modern world."

"My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends — It gives a lovely light."

"And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it."

"Little Billy’s mother was always telling him exactly what he was allowed to do and what he was not allowed to do. All the things he was allowed to do were boring. All the things he was not allowed to do were exciting. One of the things he NEVER NEVER was allowed to do, the most exciting of them all, was to go out through the garden gate all by himself and explore the world beyond."

"It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like so long as somebody loves you."

"Ah, but they is not killing their own kind," the BFG said. "Human beans is the only animals that is killing their own kind."

"Dreams is very mystical things," the BFG said. "Human beans is not understanding them at all. Not even their brainiest professors is understanding them."

"“Words,” he said, “is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life. So you must simply try to be patient and stop squibbling. As I am telling you before, I know exactly what words I is wanting to say, but somehow or other they is always getting squiff-squiddled around.” “That happens to everyone,” Sophie said. “Not like it happens to me,” the B.F.G. said. “I is speaking the most terrible wigglish.” “I think you speak beautifully,” Sophie said. “You do?” cried the B.F.G., suddenly brightening. “You really do?” “Simply beautifully,” Sophie repeated. “Well that is the nicest present anyone is ever giving me in my whole life!” cried the B.F.G. “Are you sure you is not twiddling my leg?” “Of course not,” Sophie said. “I just love the way you talk". “How wondercrump!” cried the B.F.G., still beaming. “How whoopsy-splunkers! How absolutely squiffling! I is all of a stutter.”"

""This is the repulsant snozzcumber! I squoggle it! I mispise it! I dispunge it! But if I is refusing to guzzle up human beans like the other giants, I must spend my life guzzling up icky-poo snozzcumbers instead. Or else I will be nothing but skin and groans"."

"Must Israel, like Germany, be brought to her knees before she learns how to behave in this world?"

"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."

"I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. If you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good, either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be."

"A Message to Children Who Have Read This Book - When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important: a stodgy parent is no fun at all. What a child wants and deserves is a parent who is SPARKY."

"Grown-ups are quirky creatures, full of quirks and secrets."

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

"“I’m afraid the camera got smashed against the side of the Space Hotel, Mr. President,” Shuckworth replied. The President said a very rude word into the microphone and ten million children across the nation began repeating it gleefully and got smacked by their parents."

"“It soon began to dawn on me He wasn’t very bright, Because when he was twenty-three He couldn’t read or write. ‘What shall we do?’ his parents sob. ‘The boy has got the vapors! He couldn’t even get a job Delivering the papers!’ ‘Ah-ha,’ I said, ‘this little clot Could be a politician.’ ‘Nanny,’ he cried, ‘Oh Nanny, what A super proposition!’ ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘let’s learn and note The art of politics. Let’s teach you how to miss the boat And how to drop some bricks, And how to win the people’s vote And lots of other tricks. Let’s learn to make a speech a day Upon the T.V. screen, In which you never never say Exactly what you mean. And most important, by the way, Is not to let your teeth decay, And keep your fingers clean.’ And now that I am eighty-nine, It’s too late to repent. The fault was mine the little swine Became the President.”"

"“Hooray!” said the Chief of the Army. “Let's blow everyone up! Bang-bang! Bang-bang!”"

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