Fatherhood Quote by Roald Dahl

Dahl’s line lands like a perfectly timed eyebrow raise: the supposed oddity isn’t that a Norwegian man keeps diaries, but that he does it in “perfect English,” as if linguistic competence were a kind of social magic trick. The comedy is dry and class-conscious. “Perfect” isn’t just praise; it’s a passport stamp. It implies there’s an English standard worth aspiring to, and that meeting it confers legitimacy even inside a private notebook no one is meant to police.

The subtext is immigrant self-fashioning. A diary is where you’re meant to be most unguarded, yet Dahl’s father performs an identity there too, choosing the language of the country he’s living in (and, crucially, the country whose institutions reward fluency). That choice hints at vigilance: the sense that even your inner life should be legible in the dominant tongue, in case it ever needs to be produced, defended, or admired. It’s assimilation not as surrender, but as strategy.

Context matters: Dahl, born in Wales to Norwegian parents, grew up navigating Englishness as both inheritance and obstacle. His fiction is full of adults obsessed with rules, propriety, and “correct” behavior; this little observation reads like an origin story for that theme. The sentence looks innocuous, but it exposes how language becomes a silent hierarchy: the foreign father gains authority by mastering the code, and the son learns early that belonging can hinge on syntax.