Daily Inspiration Quote by Dodie Smith

Smith’s genius here is the bait-and-switch: she starts with “dear,” a word that usually softens, then immediately hands you an octopus. Family isn’t framed as a cozy hearth; it’s a creature with suction cups, a living system that clings. The metaphor does two things at once. It admits the smothering reality of kinship - obligation, expectations, emotional leverage - while confessing that much of the clinging is mutual. We like to imagine we’re trapped. Smith suggests we also reach back.

The syntax tightens that ambivalence. “Never quite escape” is already a hedge: not “never,” but “never quite,” as if adulthood, distance, or rebellion can loosen a few tentacles but not the whole animal. Then she doubles down with the sly, almost stammered repetition: “nor in our innermost hearts never quite wish to.” The extra “never” reads like a purposeful overcorrection, the way people talk when they’re trying to tell the truth without admitting too much. The subtext is emotional complicity: even when family hurts, it’s familiar; even when it limits us, it also anchors us.

As a dramatist, Smith is writing from inside the pressure-cooker of domestic life, where love and control share a room and nobody gets clean exits. Coming of age in early 20th-century Britain, she would have watched “family” function as both refuge and social apparatus - a private unit that enforced class, gender roles, and reputations. Calling it an octopus punctures sentimentality without pretending detachment. It’s a portrait of intimacy as entanglement: absurd, tender, and a little terrifying.