Top 186 Welsh Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

I don't think I have one particular favourite writer. I have many whose works I will always buy or reread - Muriel Spark, Anthony Powell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy, William McIlvanney, Kate Atkinson, John Burnside, Louise Welsh, Iain Banks.

I am the granddaughter of a Welsh coal miner who was determined that his kids get out of the mines. My dad got his first job when he was six years old, in a little village in Wales called Nantyffyllon, cleaning bottles at the Colliers Arms.

Nigeria is not a nation. It is a mere geographical expression. There are no 'Nigerians' in the same sense as there are 'English,' 'Welsh,' or 'French.' The word 'Nigerian' is merely a distinctive appellation to distinguish those who live within the boundaries of Nigeria and those who do not.

For me as a Welsh actor, Richard Burton is one of my biggest idols. And I've got so many: Peter O'Toole, Laurence Olivier and Oliver Reed. If they got 'Hunky Dory' and 'Citadel' offered to them, they would do completely different jobs on both of them.

I don't have any phobias with any language, and I've grown up listening to Anglo-American rock n roll as well as Welsh-language punk rock and I'm all for sharing languages.

I went to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, which was great but very different from a typical university. They sat us down in the first week and said: if you want to party, you've come to the wrong place. There was no lie-ins or skipping lectures.

The Welsh are not like any other people in Britain, and they know how separate they are. They are the Celts, the tough little wine-dark race who were the original possessors of the island, who never mixed with the invaders coming later from the east, but were slowly driven into the western mountains.

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.

Lieutenant Welsh remembered walking around among the sleeping men, and thinking to himself that 'they had looked at and smelled death all around them all day but never even dreamed of applying the term to themselves. They hadn't come here to fear. They hadn't come to die. They had come to win.

Every Sri Lankan, and almost every visitor to Sri Lanka, carries a longing for the place in some small form - hiraeth, the Welsh call it - wherever they go and whatever their background. It binds them however much the war and politics might try to divide them.

I got a part in the film 'Emma' in which Gwyneth was playing the lead. She was going out with Brad Pitt at the time. I asked her if, with a name like Gwyneth, she had any Welsh connections. She wasn't terribly friendly.

I certainly treasure the memory and indeed the picture, which still hangs in my house in Scotland, of Ronnie Barker and I with the Choir when we came to Wales to shoot our Welsh choir section of the "Two Ronnies" programme. You are very close to my heart.

I do what I can, but I'll always give it a shot. You're not going to see me playing a Welsh character any time soon, not because I wouldn't love to. I went up to Wales once and read for a film with Rhys Ifans, and haven't been asked back since. We did have a nice time on the train on the way back.

We are always giving foreign names to very native things. If there is a thing that reeks of the glorious tradition of the old English tavern, it is toasted cheese. But for some wild reason we call it Welsh rarebit. I believe that what we call Irish stew might more properly be called English stew, and that it is not particularly familiar in Ireland.

His mother had told him that when you looked into the eyes of God at the pearly gates, all the questions you ever had were answered. Ronan had a lot of questions. Waking Glendower might be like that. Fewer angels attending, and maybe a heavier Welsh accent. Slightly less judgment.

The best way to prepare for a night out with a Shakespearean tragedy is to do a bit of reading up in the afternoon, eat a light supper - perhaps Welsh rarebit - and then arrive early to do some stretching exercises in the foyer before curtain-up.

When I was five, my uncle bought us a tape recorder and my dad tried to record us kids talking and singing, stuff like that. There's really quite a lot of me in a really Welsh accent going, 'Can I tell a joke? Can I sing a song?' - really annoying and brattish.

To me singing is a joy. Choral singing is a delight. Welsh Choral singing is more than a delight. The Treorchy Male Choir is the best in choral singing. How then can they be described except in superlatives? They are without equal.

Most English-speaking people, for instance, will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent.

When I moved to Wales more than twenty years ago and began to research 'Here Be Dragons,' I was fascinated from the first by the Welsh medieval laws, by the discovery that women enjoyed a greater status in Wales than elsewhere in Europe.

We're both Welshmen and growing up, when Howard Marks was finally caught, it was all over the news. He did an interview in the Welsh language, which I also speak, and I was sort of just amazed that this man from a small country was for many years supplying much of the world with most of the marijuana it was smoking. It was incredible.

Some ministers preach from notes and some don't. They have argued about it for centuries. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. Two Welsh preachers were on their way to a meeting. One noticed that the other carried written outlines. 'Ah,' he remonstrated, 'you cannot carry fire on paper.' 'True,' replied his companion, 'but you can use paper to start a fire!'

You can get this feeling of the English or Scottish or Irish or Welsh fairy, but it is by nature very elusive. It would be possible to pin down a German fairy, but the English one just vanishes, becomes the shadow under the trees.

My parents aren't artists or anything, but growing up in Wales, especially in a Welsh language school and community, they have this thing called the Eisteddfod where people compete in singing and acting and dancing and oratory all sorts of things. From a very young age, it's been a part of my upbringing.

Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"-- they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. (p. 107-108)

I'm half-Welsh, half-Russian. My maternal grandmother is Russian. I've very much a mongrel, which is good in a way because it makes me quite a blank canvas.

In 1977, while I was performing in a play in Cardiff, a friend introduced me to a striking redhead called Myfanwy Talog, famed for her appearances on Welsh television with the comedy duo Rees and Ronnie. We were instantly smitten and eventually moved in together, sharing 18 happy years.

I couldn't give a sh*t what they have to say. As soon as I go home and see my husband James Thornton of Holby Blue fame and pick up my dog and cuddle him, that's all that matters. I couldn't care if some theatre reviewer thinks my American accent sounds a bit Welsh.

Years later, when I was working as a trolley wally in a supermarket, I tackled the boredom by talking to the customers in as many different accents as I could manage. I started with one that I didn't think would alert any suspicion - generic Asian - then moved on to Irish, Welsh, Australian and American.

Maybe because English is my second language, maybe I just translate mundane clichés from the Welsh language and they sound original in English. I am going through a bit of an obsession with bad puns. I am hoping I'll grow out of it. Maybe it's just a phase.

The Census Bureau is thinking of creating a new category because so many kids don't know how to describe themselves using the existing categories. I call these kids the "Keanu Reeves Generation," after the actor who has a Hawaiian father and a Welsh mother.

I've done my coaching badges, I've got my Pro Licence, but I enjoy what I'm doing now. I'm also the elite performance director of the Welsh FA. The main thing for me was always Liverpool Football Club and my country, Wales - and I'm lucky enough to still be involved with both of them.

I was fired from my first job in New York. I was just out of school, doing the Welsh play, 'The Corn Is Green,' at Equity Library Theater. I was studying with Uta Hagen, and I was really working well, but they got nervous. They wanted results right away. We had a run-through, and I wasn't there yet, so they fired me.

What are you doing following me around the back streets of London, you little idiot?” Will demanded, giving her arm a light shake. Cecily’s eyes narrowed. “This morning it was cariad (note: Welsh endearment, like ‘darling’ or ‘love’), now it’s idiot.

I grew up in Shropshire, but I was born in Wales. There was a hospital seven miles away, but my dad drove 45 miles over the Welsh border so I could play rugby for Wales. But as a skinny asthmatic, I was only ever good at swimming.

In Ehrenfeld, we were all jammed together. All the fathers were foreign-born - Welsh, Irish, Polish, Sicilian. We were so jammed together, we picked up each other's accents. And we spoke some broken English. When I got into the service, people used to think I was from a foreign country.

It's funny because when you're a Welshman living in England, you always get the mickey taken out of you for being Welsh, and then when you go to Wales with an English accent because you were born in Bristol and grew up in Birmingham, they say you're English. You can never win.

The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.

Thimerosal is commonly used as an antiseptic/preservative in vaccines in the range of 1:10,000 to 1:20,000. Welsh's and Hunter's 1940 findings, applied to current thimerosal use in vaccines, lead to the conclusion that thimerosal completely inhibits phagocytosis in blood, one of the body's most vital immune defenses!

RAREBIT n. A Welsh rabbit, in the speech of the humorless, who point out that it is not a rabbit. To whom it may be solemnly explained that the comestible known as toad-in-a-hole is really not a toad, and that riz-de-veau à la financière is not the smile of a calf prepared after the recipe of a she banker.

There are four of us, and we were all born in different cities because my dad worked all around the place. We settled in Birmingham, so I spent most of my time growing up there. We were all given very Welsh names - Geraint, Owen, Rhiannon and Gwilym. My mum's called Cainwen, and my dad is somewhat disappointingly called Tom.

I was always far more into anything creative that called for a bit of active participation, like reading aloud in class. Then, having left school shortly after my GCSEs, I auditioned for the National Youth Theatre of Wales and the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain as well as the Welsh National Youth Opera. I ended up getting into all three.

My mother was Welsh and I loved going to Wales every summer, where Uncle Les had a farm. My mother had seven brothers and a sister and they were all very close. There would always be food on the table and uncles coming in and out. My father's family were English and lived in London, and we didn't really see them.

When you ask your white friends what their cultural heritage is, they don't just say white. They give you a math equation. 'Well, I'm a third German and a fourth Irish and one-sixteenth Welsh and one-fortieth Native American for college applications.'

As a Welshman that can't sing, I never feel more proud to be Welsh than when I hear the Treorchy Male Choir - the Master Choir of them all. If I could sing I would apply for membership myself.

You know I could have stayed in my comfortable chair in South Wales having the first Welsh team that got promoted and been there a number of years, but for me I wanted to work at a club that was world class and at the very, very top.

Many of the Victorian and Edwardian activists who campaigned for Irish home rule, for instance, also wanted what they called 'home rule all round': separate parliaments not simply for Ireland but also for the Scots and the Welsh - and for the English.

Some accents people - internationally - can't understand, also they come with baggage. London means a certain thing, Liverpool means a certain thing. Whereas with Welsh, he can be a middle-class man with working-class roots and still have an accent and it not be an issue.

They [Rappites] were moving from Southern Indiana to Pennsylvania, where they had originally settled when they came from Germany. They were looking for someone who wanted to buy a pre-built town, which wouldn't have been appropriate for any kind of normal settlement. That's when Robert Owen [Welsh industrialist and utopian socialist] buys the village and founds New Harmony.

The country I live in is never clear about its name. My passport says 'the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,' and citizens of the U.K. may call themselves British, English, Scottish, Welsh or from Northern Ireland.

Being hapa, or more specifically, half-Japanese half-Euro mutt (English, Irish, Scottish, Dutch, French, Welsh, German. . .in case you were wondering), has definitely helped shape who I am. It's very cool to get to identify and learn about all these unique cultures and I think it's helped put the world in perspective.

Why? I mean, why you? I can perfectly comprehend not liking my husband. I dislike him intensely most of the time.” Professor Lyall stifled a chuckle. “I am given to understand that he does not approve of spelling one’ s name with two ll’s. He finds it inexcusably Welsh. I suspect he may be quite taken with you, however.

Everyone I know is fervently proud to be Welsh but you try not to be preachy about it. It's difficult at times. But when I go home to north Wales, or to somewhere I've never been in south Wales, I still feel at home because I'm in Wales. It's hard to explain.

I think most of the world would like to be Scottish. All the Americans who come here never look for English blood or Welsh, only for Scottish and Irish. It's understandable. The Scots effectively created the face of the modern world: the railways, the bridges, the tunnels.

Anyone who thinks that wind factories are environmentally friendly should Google "Cefn Croes Photo Gallery", to see 100 chilling pictures showing how many miles of unspoiled Welsh countryside were disfigured to create the largest industrial site in Britain: all to "save" annually less than a quarter of the CO? emissions from a single jumbo jet.

Because it's my first language, all the literature that I've read and all the things that I've been inspired by that have been written in Welsh have moved me beyond anything that I've experienced in any other language.

End rhymes are not enough. Every word-sound in a poem should find an echo in another, neighbouring word's sound to achieve what Ezra Pound called melopoeia. (This is something like what the Welsh call Cynghanned.)

When I started in the profession, there were very visible actors who were Scottish, Welsh, or regional. Lots of working-class-hero leading actors; it was not fashionable to sound posh. Now, I'm middle-aged; it's fashionable to sound posh if you are the generation behind me.

I've been lucky that I've performed with a lot of the classical people I've wanted to work with so I'd like to do something that people didn't see coming. Like Madonna, or being Welsh - the Tom Jones thing. Or somebody suggested N-Dubz - that would be brilliant!

Those songs [from church], I think, shaped to some degree how I would evolve as a writer, pentameter of songs, the melodies of those kind of hillbilly hymns - I used to refer to them - because they were not Southern gospel as much as they were passed down from Scottish Welsh Protestant hymnals.