Wales Quotes

“Do you miss Wales?” Tessa inquired.
Will shrugged lightly. “What’s to miss? Sheep and singing,” he said. “And the ridiculous language. Fe hoffwn i fod mor feddw, fyddai ddim yn cofio fy enw.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means ‘I wish to get so drunk I no longer remember my own name,’ Quite useful.”
― Cassandra Clare, Clockwork Prince

“Wizard Howl," said Wizard Suliman. "I must apologize for trying to bite you so often. In the normal way, I wouldn't dream of setting teeth in a fellow countryman.”
― Diana Wynne Jones, Howl’s Moving Castle

“Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding 'like Princess Di') but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations where Americans assumed no Englishmen were listening.

And it is the English, specifically, who are the targets of this. Few Americans have heard of Wales. All of them have heard of Ireland and many of them think they are Irish. Scotland gets a sort of free pass, especially since Braveheart re-established the Scots' anti-English credentials among the ignorant millions who get their history off the TV.”
― Peter Hitchens

“In Summer there were white and damask roses, and the smell of thyme and musk. In Spring there were green gooseberries and throstles [thrush], and the flowers they call ceninen [daffodils]. And leeks and cabbages also grew in that garden; and between long straight alleys, and apple-trained espaliers, there were beds of strawberries, and mint, and sage.”
― Beatrix Potter

“During the day, memories could be held at bay, but at night, dreams became the devil's own accomplices.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, The Reckoning

“The language itself, whether you speak it or not, whether you love it or hate it, is like some bewitchment or seduction from the past, drifting across the country down the centuries, subtly affecting the nations sensibilities even when its meaning is forgotten.”
― Jan Morris, Wales: The First Place

“Dychwelyd i wlad eich hynafiaid; gwaed yn galw i waed.
Return to the land of your fathers; blood calls to blood.”
― Horton Deakins

“...It's not that the worm forgives the plough; it gives it no mind. (Pain occurs, in passing.) (lines 37-39 in the poem 'Fantasia on a Theme from IKEA')”
― Philip Gross, The Water Table

“It was an American who said that while a Frenchman's truth was akin to a straight line, a Welshman's truth was more in the nature of a curve, and it is a fact that Welsh affairs are entangled always in parabola, double-meaning and implication. This makes for a web-like interest....”
― Jan Morris, Wales: The First Place

“Why should I not know what he's really called?"
"Tell a man your name and he will have power over you forever," Carver muttered.”
― Melika Dannese Lux, Deadmarsh Fey

“In Wales, they love with abandon.
When a Welsh person loves you,
you'll finally know your potential.
They are different from the Americans,
who are precarious with their love.
They are different from the English,
who are reserved even when you stand
in front of them, naked,
handing them your heart.
The English give you their love in cups:
here, you’ve been good. drink another glass.
But the Welsh, they drown you
in an ocean of love.
You have their attention, their
consideration. You have all of them.
They aren’t even careful to keep any
for themselves. It seems to me
that only the Welsh know how to love,
how to make someone feel loved.
Because when a Welsh person loves you,
you’ll finally know how it feels
to belong to poetry.”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Of all the Winter Service Industries, the Winter Consul was the most dangerous. Few who joined expected to last out the decade, yet recruitment was never much of a problem. You didn't find the job, they said, it found you. No-one ever who entered the Winter voluntarily wasn't trying to leave something behind.”
― Jasper Fforde, Early Riser

“...the cold got into your bones, and no matter how many logs you threw on the fire, you never felt truly warm.”
― Neil Ansell, Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills

“For the benefit of those half-dozen people who will see a name like Gwillim and put this book down in order to go look it up to see where it comes from — it is the Welsh version of William”
― Ammon Shea, The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads

“Our angst springs from coming from South Wales. It's a longing encapsulated in the Welsh word "hireath". The Irish can usually see the better side of things, they have a sense of wonder. The Welsh don't. We think everything is going to turn out shit.”
― Nicky Wire, A Version of Reason: In Search of Richey Edwards

“Bible in one hand, pistol in the pistol in the other, the preacher sat astride a horse, his voice lifted to God’s light and a clear sky.”
― Charles Cordell, God's Vindictive Wrath

“My father was a Catholic, a coal miner in the Big Pit. My mother a Jew. A charwoman, when she could find the work. They didn’t fit in Wales. Nor in the U.K., either. They didn’t fit with each other all that well, for that matter. They fought every day for as long as I can remember and loved each other more than anyone I’ve ever known. At least they did right up till a night when he looked right and not left at a train crossing in Chepstow and ended up half a mile from where he’d started, dead as the Ghost. Looking for a job, he was. Turned out he didn’t need one.”
― Patrick Reinken, Omicron

“How green was my Valley, then, and the Valley of them that have gone.”
― Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley

“This was the very heart of Wales' rainforest zone, where the oceanic climate conspires to make conditions perfect for the rich profusion of plant life that we'd spent the past week exploring. Yet here, humanity had found a rainforest and turned it into a desert. It had started long ago, no doubt: Wales' Green Desert is the product of agricultural malpractice dating back to the twelfth-century monks of Strata Florida. But what began as a profitable enterprise in medieval times today supports a mere twenty-eight farms over an area covering 46,000 acres. The farming unions claim that rewilding will lead to rural depopulation, but centuries of overgrazing have already drained the land of both people and wildlife.

And in doing so, Wales is losing part of its heritage, its culture. Because the Wales of this great country's myths and legends was a rainforest nation, whose peoples lived and coexisted with the Atlantic oakwoods that once carpeted their land, celebrating them in song. They knew these rainforests and knew them deeply, weaving them into their stories, vesting their greatest heroes with a magic derived from that profound knowledge of place and ecology.

There is a way back from this, but it is unlikely to come through a culture war between sheep farmers and rewilders. The truth is that there is more than enough space in Wales, as there is in the rest of Britain, both for farming to continue and for more rainforest to flourish.”
― Guy Shrubsole, The Lost Rainforests of Britain

“There are more things in Heaven and earth..." Uncle Gryffyn muttered.
"Now ain't the time to be quotin' old Bill Shakes, guv," Bellows shot in.”
― Melika Dannese Lux, Deadmarsh Fey

“The myth that the island of Britain was the God-given property of Welsh-speaking peoples stolen by the Saxons meant that the Welsh were reluctant to give up their claim on Britain by rejecting Britishness.”
― Simon Brooks, Why Wales Never Was: The Failure of Welsh Nationalism

“When we would go camping in rural Wales, we would get sick. What I did not realize at the time was the sickness was a detoxification reaction from the toxic city environment that we normally lived in.”
― Steven Magee

“To be born in Wales, not with a silver spoon in your mouth, but with music in your blood and with poetry in your soul, is a privilege indeed.”
― Brian Harris

“Thus did these two, the man from Wales and the man from Norfolk, enter the silent streets of the town of Glastonbury.”
― John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance

“Winters here are hard. It is not so much the cold as the long nights, and I tended to sleep early and wake with first light to minimize the hours spent sitting in the darkness in forced immobility, idly tending the fire.”
― Neil Ansell, Deep Country: Five Years in the Welsh Hills

“We'd become aliens in our own land," he'd warned, "denied our own laws, our own language, even our yesterdays, for a conquered people are not allowed a prideful past. Worst of all, we'd be leaving our children and grandchildren a legacy of misery and loss, a future bereft of hope.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, The Reckoning

“Like many children, I had a telescope from a young age. I was familiar with some constellations and the moon and planets. I always enjoyed looking up at the night sky and seeing the few stars up there in the orange sky in Liverpool, UK. The streetlights made it hard to see much of the night sky in Liverpool. I always enjoyed my camping trips to rural Wales because there were few streetlights and the night sky was actually black! It was a very different night sky, far more stars and the cloud of the Milky Way could be seen.”
― Steven Magee, Magee’s Disease

“As one, they yelled the name of a princess butchered, a child locked in a barren convent, the last drifting snow of Glyndŵr. ‘Gwenllian!”
― Charles Cordell, God's Vindictive Wrath

“Within the Atlantic archipelago, there is a persistent idea that Ireland, Scotland and Wales are qualitatively different from England, that they are inherently and permanently 'Celtic' in spite of modern realities, and that nations of the 'Celtic Fringe' (a term which places England at the centre and places the 'Celtic nations' at the periphery) share some vague spiritual or racial bond.”
― Richard Alan Barlow, Modern Irish and Scottish Literature: Connections, Contrasts, Celticisms

“Y Ddraig Goch ddyry gychwyn," my second muttered under his breath as the three of us stalked away, seeking to shelter ourselves within the slinking shadows.
The corner of my lip turned up at his remark.
The Red Dragon will show the way.”
― K.V. Wilson, Incarnate