Love & Passion Quote by Roald Dahl

Homesickness gets smuggled in here as geography. Dahl turns the Bristol Channel - a real, chilly stretch of water - into a private navigational instrument, something you can hold onto when you can’t hold onto home. The sentence is almost stubbornly plain, but the emotional mechanism is sly: if you can’t cross the distance, you can at least map it. That “imaginary line” is a child’s technology for survival, a DIY umbilical cord drawn through darkness from bed to Wales.

Dahl’s intent isn’t to romanticize place so much as to show how comfort is manufactured under pressure. A bed is usually safety; here it’s also exile. The line is drawn from the most intimate, confined space to the larger world he’s been separated from, suggesting a mind that refuses to accept the severing. “Always” appears twice, doing the work of ritual. This isn’t a one-off daydream; it’s a practiced act, repetition as ballast. When institutions (school, adults, borders) feel arbitrary and immovable, the imagination becomes an instrument panel.

The subtext also hints at the Dahl we later read: a writer fascinated by how children build secret systems beneath adult reality. The comfort isn’t sentimental; it’s logistical. He doesn’t say he felt loved, he says he could draw a line. That cool precision is part of the trick - an emotional confession disguised as direction-finding. Contextually, it fits the early dislocations of his life: a Welsh-Norwegian childhood shaped by separation, where distance becomes not just miles but mood, and the mind learns to turn absence into story.