The Umbrella Man and Other Stories Quotes

“Give us strength, oh Lord, to let our children starve.”
― Roald Dahl, The Great Automatic Grammatizator And Other Stories

“Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!”
― Roald Dahl, The Great Automatic Grammatizator And Other Stories

“He was smiling now, and a sort of golden glow of pleasure was spreading over his round pink face. I saw his tongue come out to lick the white moustache, as though searching for one last drop of that precious whisky.”
― Roald Dahl, The Umbrella Man

“My mother’s chin was up and she was staring down at him along the full length of her nose. It was a fearsome thing, this frosty-nosed stare of my mother’s. Most people go to pieces completely when she gives it to them. I once saw my own headmistress begin to stammer and simper like an idiot when my mother gave her a really foul frosty-noser. But the little man on the pavement with the umbrella over his head didn’t bat an eyelid.”
― Roald Dahl, The Umbrella Man

“I saw my mother looking at him suspiciously. She is a suspicious person, my mother. She is especially suspicious of two things—strange men and boiled eggs. When she cuts the top off a boiled egg, she pokes around inside it with her spoon as though expecting to find a mouse or something. With strange men, she has a golden rule which says, “The nicer the man seems to be, the more suspicious you must become.” This little old man was particularly nice. He was polite. He was well spoken. He was well dressed. He was a real gentleman. The reason I knew he was a gentleman was because of his shoes. “You can always spot a gentleman by the shoes he wears,” was another of my mother’s favourite sayings. This man had beautiful brown shoes.”
― Roald Dahl, The Umbrella Man

“For example, there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.” “Where?” “In the ‘word-memory’ section,” he said, epexegetically.”
― Roald Dahl, The Umbrella Man and Other Stories