Roald Dahl

If you are good, life is good.

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.

Somewhere inside all of us is the power to change the world.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly.

I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.

There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there, you’ll be free if you truly wish to be.

Once you’re grown up you can’t come back.

With every word we utter, with every action we take, we know our kids are watching us. We as parents, are their most important role models.

The streets and woods around my house were a perfect setting for fake mischief. I would spend all afternoon pretending I had run away and had to live on my own. I would bring Toll House cookies and a sweatshirt and try to make a fire. I would sneak out side my house at dusk with a pair binoculars and search the streets for murderers. I created scenarios in my head that I always managed to escape from kidnap fantasies where I would wriggle free from the ropes.

On the farm, I had chores. I had a calf. We had a herd of cattle in the pasture. We’d go and get me a calf at a cow auction with Amish people, which I would raise. I gave it a bottle every day, in this cute little coop, like a giant dog coop almost. I’ve always been a big animal person.

We’re all mad here.

They say that every child learns from their mother – it’s ingrained from babyhood.

Kids instinctively know – although they will argue to the contrary – that they really are not mature enough to make good decisions on some important issues.

I was a regular hand when I was 7. I picked cotton. I drove tractors. Children grew up not thinking that this is what they must do. We thought this was the thing to do to help your family.

And let’s be clear: It’s not enough just to limit ads for foods that aren’t healthy. It’s also going to be critical to increase marketing for foods that are healthy.

When I was a little girl, I remember carrying my orange UNICEF carton with me as I went Trick-or-Treating.

Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

Back when we was in school in Mississippi, we had Little Black Sambo. That’s what you learned: Anytime something was not good, or anytime something was bad in some kinda way, it had to be called black. Like, you had Black Monday, Black Friday, black sheep… Of course, everything else, all the good stuff, is white. White Christmas and such.

I was planning to go into law or politics. I was well known for my public speaking. I went to an all-girl boarding school with uniforms. It was very posh for someone like me who came from a world where my parents showed beagles and sold dog products out of a yellow caravan.

You can’t cheat kids. If you cheat them when they’re children they’ll make you pay when they’re sixteen or seventeen by revolting against you or hating you or all those so-called teenage problems. I think that’s finally when they’re old enough to stand up to you and say, ‘What a hypocrite you’ve been all this time. You’ve never given me what I really wanted, which is you’.

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.