Daily Inspiration Quote by Roald Dahl

Speed was supposed to make the world bigger. Dahl flips that promise and shows how modern mobility can shrink experience into something consumable. The line lands like a sigh disguised as a punchline: if you can be whisked from London to anywhere in a few hours, “anywhere” stops sounding like a spell and starts sounding like a timetable. “Fabulous” here isn’t just “nice.” It’s the older sense of the word: fable-like, charged with danger, distance, and the delicious uncertainty of what you don’t know.

Dahl’s intent is less nostalgia for slower travel than a critique of frictionless access. The subtext is that wonder requires obstacles. When journeys used to be arduous, the world came with a built-in narrative arc: departure, ordeal, transformation, return. Replace that with air-conditioned transit and standardized terminals, and the plot collapses. The destination becomes a product you “do,” not a mystery you’re changed by. Even the word “nowadays” carries a faintly annoyed shrug, the voice of someone watching enchantment get rationalized out of existence.

Context matters: Dahl lived through the mid-century acceleration of technology and tourism, and he built his fiction on the idea that the ordinary world has trapdoors into the marvelous. His children’s stories insist that magic is hiding in plain sight, yet this sentence admits a cultural counterforce: modern life trains us to treat astonishment as inefficient. It’s a warning in miniature: when everything is reachable, nothing feels earned, and the fabulous becomes just another checkbox on an itinerary.