Here, are the stiffening hills, here, the rich cargoCongealed in the dark arteries,Old veinsThat hold Glamorgan’s blood.The midnight miner in the secret seams,Limb, life, and bread.- Rhondda Valley

During the day, memories could be held at bay, but at night, dreams became the devil’s own accomplices.

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...

…what an unfair advantage the dead had over the living, for there could be no rebuttal, no denial, nothing but the accusing silence of the grave.

One person cannot make up for the evils of a whole system and it is the system that is to blame – the system of narrowness and of pride, and of exclusiveness, and of no...

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...

It means ‘I wish to get so drunk I no longer remember my own name,’ Quite useful.

…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’)

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

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...

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.

There are no more gates, only hinges clinging to the walls like broken spiders.

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...

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...

Out in the stone-pile the toad squatted with its glowing jewel-eyes and, maybe, its memories. I don’t know if you’ll admit a toad could have memories. But I don’t know, either, if you’ll admit there...