The Welsh Quotes & Sayings

There is nothing like the sound of a Welsh Male Choir and the Treorchy is the finest. They have represented the best of the Welsh voice for generations with honour and integrity. They are international ambassadors. — Tom Jones

I was the adoring son of a Welsh-Irish father, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, a Catholic Knight of Columbus who was a blue-collar, trade union organizer and, not surprisingly, a fervid Nixon-hater. — Bob Gunton

Creu Gwir fel gwydr o ffwrnais awen Creating truth like glass from the furnace of inspiration — Gwyneth Lewis

Begbie doesnae even notice; he's in his element, particularly good at funerals in the way a lot ay psychopaths tend tae be. Ah suppose if bringing death and despair is yir life's work, then being somewhere like this must feel like a result; the job's already done and you can just kick back and relax. — Irvine Welsh

Ah walk doon Hammersmith Broadway, London seeming strange and alien, after only a three-month absence, as familiar places do when you've been away. It's as if everything is a copy of what you knew before, similar, yet somehow lacking in its usual qualities, a bit like the wey things are in a dream. They say you have to live in a place to know it, but you have to come fresh tae really see it. — Irvine Welsh

Instead of boiling up individuals into the species, I would draw a chalk circle round every individuality, and preach to it to keep within that, and preserve and cultivate its identity. — Jane Welsh Carlyle

The glittering baits of titles and honours are only for children and fools. — Jane Welsh Carlyle

Names are not always what they seem. The common Welsh name Bzjxxllwcp is pronounced Jackson. — Mark Twain

The disease which racked his body was a sweetheart compared to the more obscure one that possessed his sick mind. — Irvine Welsh

On this world you have the animals and they have as much right to be on this world as us; and it's man who is the reason they are pushed to extinction. They're killing them for their tusks and their horns, and these fucking idiots, they think claws will give them sex appeal and they get all fucking sissy on you. — Stephen Richards

The new people were something else before they were white - Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish - and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Now, I call this nice. I got my daughter, my granddaughter, and my great-grandson, all in the same room. What more could a man ask of life?" He took a Welsh cake. — Ken Follett

Not a hundredth part of the thoughts in my head have ever been or ever will be spoken or written - as long as I keep my senses, at least. — Jane Welsh Carlyle

Can you taste it Bruce? Can you taste the filth, the dirt, the oily blackness of that fossil fuel in our mouth as you choke and gag and spit it out? Do you still hear his voice in your head urging you to eat? Eat, eat eat. Your mother's cries. Do you hear them? You should be Bruce. Because I know that it's never left you alone. Now you can eat what you want to eat. For me, for you, for all the others. Now you can consume to your heart's content or your soul's destruction, whichever comes first. So eat. — Irvine Welsh

It's always struck me as funny that guys with scars get a reputation for being hard. It's the ones that cut them you should be looking out for, right? — Louise Welsh

There was once upon a time a census officer who had to record the names of all householders in a certain Welsh village. The first that he questioned was called William Williams; so were the second, third, fourth.... At last he said to himself: 'This is tedious; evidently they are all called William Williams. I shall put them down so and take a holiday'. But he was wrong; there was just one whose name was John Jones. This shows that we may go astray if we trust too implicitly to induction by simple enumeration. — Bertrand Russell

The fact that you use the term "cunt" in the same breath as "sexist", shows that you display the same muddled, fucked-up thinking oan this issue as you do oan everything else. — Irvine Welsh

It was time to take the best bits from them all and build something delicious: the spirituality of the Hindus, the community spirit and family ties of the Muslims, the ancient wisdom of the Chinese, the love of freedom and equality of the Afro-Caribbeans, the work ethic of the Jews, the bloody-mindedness and wry humour of the Australians, the blarney of the Irish, the passion of the Scots, the unorthodoxy of the Welsh, combined with our own English love of justice, fair play and democracy. Put them all together and you had a vision for the future, a direction, which Bokononism could exploit. — Bernard Hare

Someone once asked me if I knew the feeling of fear. Oh, I knew fear. Well, really speaking I never feared any fucker at that time; I've got to be honest. But I knew fear, the fear of losing! There was never any fear of combat! My father instilled that fear in to me and that was what drove me on to win ... the fear of what was to come after you went home saying you'd lost! — Stephen Richards

Schopenhauer was right: Life has to be about disillusionment stumbling inexorably towards the totally fucked. — Irvine Welsh

A normal fighter in the street fights in a different way than a disciplined boxer, but a boxer is from the other world, it's a big difference. A boxer can throw a six-inch punch. A six-inch punch can knock you clean down. I'm very wary of those boxers, I can tell you. If you get a boxer that can street fight and he mixes it together then it makes a lethal combination! I mixed boxing and street fighting in to a cocktail and when I knocked them down I kept them down by use of the boot. — Stephen Richards

His friends will decline in their numbers as his needs increase. The inverse, or perverse, mathematics ay life. — Irvine Welsh

The 'Weston' is actually my middle name. I hyphenated it because I really wasn't willing to go out in the acting world as 'Tom Jones,' 'cause I'm Welsh as well, so the connotation is just ridiculous. — Tom Weston-Jones

As one of the motorbikes came towards me, I let a big heavy right go, and knocked the rider's head clean off his shoulders! Fucking hell, the guy's head was still in his helmet and it was clattering all the way down the road. — Stephen Richards

He caught me neat, right on the fucking face and I took one step back and thought, you're not getting away with that you bastard! I was punching the piss out of him, he kept going down, but I didn't kick him, he'd had enough. I didn't put the boot in to a man older than myself. But this confrontation was out of the blue, out of the fucking blue. That's what I had to face. — Stephen Richards

People keep telling me that I'm a legend in Merthyr and a legend in many other places. Here's my understanding on that, what's a legend? I don't really know what a legend is, I don't even know the word. I'm not a King Arthur reincarnate either. I might be one of the Round Table, but I'm not King Arthur. — Stephen Richards

-Fiona, this is my mate, Frank Begbie. Or Franco. Or Beggars. Or the Beggar Boy. Or the Generalissmo. Or Psychotic Bullying Prick. — Irvine Welsh

He settled in beside me, and I curled into him. Cocooned in Wes. God, it felt so good. "Thank you," I whispered. "I've never felt so amazing."

"I wanted you in my life from the beginning, Mal. Any way I could have you." He snuggled me closer. "Even if it meant just as friends."

I couldn't help snorting. "Thank God that's not the case."

He chuckled and gave me a squeeze. "Amen, my friend. — Missy Welsh

As much as Merthyr is a fighting town, these people also have hearts of gold. I worked all over Monmouth, and then the Aberfan disaster happened! That was a very emotional episode in my life. I never want to see anything like that ever again! In my opinion, the tip should have been moved well before the rain got in to it, and the old tip came rolling down the hillside on the school and the walls just caved in! — Stephen Richards

That is, " Harry said, " because the world has never seen - in initiative, imagination, courage, and steadfastness - anything like the American fighting man. Not the Germans, the non-Germans, the semi-German Viennese, the British, the Scots, the Welsh, the Cornish, the Danish, or the Nepalese. You may in the future condemn us for it. You may continue to think that we are savage, disproportionate, and uncivilized. But we saved you the last time. And it is we, I guarantee you, will will liberate Paris and drive into Berlin. We don't like it. We don't like fighting and dying. But ... when it comes time for that, we are facile princeps, and will always be. We were born for it. The terrain of the New World educated us in it. That in America every man is a king assures us of it. — Mark Helprin

Good luck to progressive candidates in U.S. Senate elections against the usual rich, white, racist, women-hating pricks they run against. — Irvine Welsh

The Welsh ... I mean, what are they for? — Anne Robinson

I don't cook anything fancy. Sheba's appetite isn't up to much and I've never been one for sauces. We eat nursery food mainly. Beans on toast, Welsh rarebit, fish fingers. Sheba leans against the oven and watches me while I work. At a certain point, she usually asks for wine. I have tried to get her to wait until she's eaten something, but she gets very scratchy when I do that, so these days I tend to give in straightaway and pour her a small glass from the carton in the fridge. You choose your battles. Sheba is a bit of a snob about drink and she keeps whining at me to get a grander sort. 'Something in a bottle, at least', she says. But I continue to buy the cartons. we are on a tight budget these days. And for all her carping, Sheba doesn't seem to have too much trouble knocking back the cheap stuff. — Zoe Heller

My father was always suppressing the softer side of my nature; it seemed to have disappeared in the course of those boxing lessons, that's what boxing did to me. My father took away the real me and replaced all what I could have been by imposing his brutal regime of terror upon me. — Stephen Richards

But what are friends? What is a husband, even, compared with one's Mother? Of her love, one is always so sure! It is the only love that nothing - not even misconduct on our part - can take away from us. — Jane Welsh Carlyle

Why didn't I know about this, Gideon?" Lady Augusta demanded, clearly aggrieved at not being first with the news. "And what Welsh aunt is this?"
"Auntie Angharad," Gideon informed her solemnly.
Lady Augusta thought for a moment and then declared, "You don't have an Auntie Angharad!"
"No," he agreed in a sorrowful voice. "She's dead. — Anne Gracie

How long could she be expected to stay in a remote elbow of the Welsh border, where the idea of an eligible batchelor was a man with two tractors? — Phil Rickman

Well Joe, the truth is that you're not a bad guy, but you have been a bit mysogynistic and homophobic. So your punishment is to make you walk the earth as a homosexual ghost buggering your old mates and aquaitances. — Irvine Welsh

Was he an alcoholic? What was that? Someone who drinks all the time? Who can't say no to a drink? Who drinks in secret? Somebody who anticipates the next drink before he's finished with the one in front of him? — Irvine Welsh

The idea of race as an indelible attribute "is a new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white." These people are a "modern invention" whose whiteness "has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white - Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish - and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myth. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

It should be the likes ay us that agitate for change, but aw we dae is drugs. — Irvine Welsh

I'd always liked to read, but when I picked up books I wasn't getting the same kind of excitement from them that I was from going out clubbing. I wanted to get the same kind of feel. — Irvine Welsh

I rely on the promise, 'God is kind to women, fools, and drunk people.' — Jane Welsh Carlyle

Some other facts I picked up:
Welsh is an actual, currently used language and our next-door neighbours Angela and Gaenor spoke it. It sounds like Wizard.
Baked beans are very popular in England. For breakfast. On toast. On baked potatoes. They can't get enough.
"American History" is not a subject everywhere.
England and Britain and the United Kingdom are not the same thing. England is the country. Britain is the island containing England, Scotland, and Wales. The United Kingdom is the formal designation of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as a political entity.
If you mess this up, you will be corrected. Repeatedly. — Maureen Johnson

Her mother had chosen the Welsh valley of Pant-y-Gyrdl as the ideal site to Return to Nature. (Six months later, sick of the rain, the mosquitoes, the men, the tent-trampling sheep who ate first the whole commune's marijuana crop and then its antique minibus, and by now beginning to glimpse why almost the entire drive of human history has been an attempt to get as far away from Nature as possible, Pepper's mother returned to Pepper's surprised grandparents in Tadfield, bought a bra, and enrolled in a sociology course with a deep sigh of relief.) — Terry Pratchett

The true structure of the Welsh grammar will be revealed only when we look at sentences slightly more complicated than its basic VSO pattern. Welsh is no different from the rest of the world: it does involve an extra step, but even that isn't all that unusual. Welsh is like Shakespearean English on acid: the verb always - not just in questions - moves to the beginning. Alternatively, it can be viewed as taking the French grammar a step further. While the verb stops at tense in French, it moves further in Welsh to a position that traditional grammarians call the complementizer (don't ask). — Charles Yang

You may be right. I think it was round about Christmas when I got my Welsh dragon tattoo."
At that, Tessa had to try very hard not to blush. "How did that happen?"
Will made an airy gesture with his hand. "I was drunk ... "
"Nonsense. You were never really drunk."
"On the contrary - in order to learn how to pretend to be inebriated, once must become inebriated at least once, as a reference point. Six-Fingered Nigel had been at the mulled cider - "
"You can't mean there's truly a Six-Fingered Nigel? — Cassandra Clare

This young woman," he indicated Miss Wintertowne, "she has, I dare say, all the usual accomplishments and virtues? She was graceful? Witty? Vivacious? Capricious? Danced like sunlight? Rode ilk the wind? Sang like an angel? Embroidered like Penelope? Spoke French, Italian, German, Breton, Welsh and many other languages?"
Mr. Norrell said he supposed so. He believed that those were the sorts of things young ladies did nowadays. — Susanna Clarke

I would put How Green Was My Valley in the same class as Uncle Tom's Cabin: a work that leaves an ineradicable "scratch on the mind," to borrow Harold Isaacs's useful phrase. There was another element as well. At a certain point, on some springy-turfed Welsh hillside far above the scenes of alienation and exploitation that lay below, young Huw contrived to part with his irksome virginity. Richard Llewellyn handled this transition with very slightly too much quasi-poetic euphemism, his crucial error being (to my fevered imagining) the idea that the inflamed heat of young manhood could be assuaged only by the relative "coolness" of a feminine interior. One had had a vague hope that the ardency would be appeased by an even greater heat, rather than sizzled like a red-hot horseshoe dipped in water, but at this stage I would have been willing to settle for anything that offered incandescence in either direction. — Christopher Hitchens

In the yard of the inn, Daffy Cadwaladyr introduced himself. "Short for Davyd," he said pleasantly.
The Londoner looked as if she'd never heard a sillier name in her life. — Emma Donoghue

no matter how early you rise or how late you turn in, you never see that point where light begins or the first bruise of darkness bleeds in under its fragile skin; the beauty, and the scary, unfathomable wisdom of transition. — Irvine Welsh

Ah ken the junk gits bad press, but ah think it's barry. It's easy tae criticize something fae outside, but yuv goat tae experience eveything in life, ken? Thinkay how shitey things would huv been for eveycat if Jim Morrison hudnae droaped acid. He widnae broken oan through tae the other side n aw barry tunes wid be shiter as a result ... it aw disnae goaway on skag:it jist disnae bother ye any mair. — Irvine Welsh

Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has 'cast up' in my time or is like to
this art by which even the 'poor' can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn't it be acting favorably on the morality of the country? — Jane Welsh Carlyle

Time passes. Listen. Time passes.
Come closer now.
Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. — Dylan Thomas

They went outside and stood where a sign used to say Taxi and now said Taxi/Tacsi for the benefit of Welsh people who had never seen a letter X before. — Kingsley Amis

The Welsh were a god-cursed, stiff-necked, and utterly vexatious people, John said bitterly, but they did have an inexplicable ability to rise phoenixlike from the ashes of defeat, to soar upwards on wings too scorched for flight. — Sharon Kay Penman

I think it's unfair to criticise someone for not being Welsh, but the smaller the nation, the more patriotic you seem to be. — Gary Speed

Now here he was, drunk and sober at the same time. Each half of him disgusted at the other. — Louise Welsh

In the chalky trough under the blackboard
are lessons dusted and already forgotten.
The teacher is squawking away once more,
scratching into the dark Welsh tabula rasa
the truths so far about God and arithmetic
with the expungible white of fossil shells. — Richie McCaffery

-The renegade robots are now long dead, the metal ones rusted, the human ones bled. — Irvine Welsh

No ambition but to use up the big wages on more drink and more hopeless horses. — Irvine Welsh

Once you've been with each other in a primal, shagging state, it's hard to talk about the weather. — Irvine Welsh

Austin Phelps makes this point in a chapter in his volume on prayer. He tells of Ethelfrith, the pagan Saxon king of Northumbria, who had invaded Wales and was about to give battle. The Welsh were Christians, and as Ethelfrith was observing the army of his opponents spread out before him, he noticed a host of unarmed men. When he asked who they were, he was told that they were the Christian monks of Bangor, praying for the success of their army. Ethelfrith immediately realized the seriousness of the situation. "Attack them first," he ordered. — Timothy J. Keller

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. — Anthony Hopkins

USA. The land of the free; where you accent didn't matter. But he supposed everybody related to it; movies, TV, fat-food, outlets, you grew up with it. Cultural imperialism. Yet no wonder everybody increasingly hated it: it was stupid, self-serving and so in-your-face that it was setting itself up to be despised — Irvine Welsh

My Welsh grandmother Mair didn't meet my grandfather until she was 28, quite old to be unmarried in the early '40s. — Kate Williams

It was like bouncing tennis balls off a mystery piece of furniture and deducing, from the direction in which the balls ricocheted, whether it was a chair or a table or a Welsh dresser. — Marcus Chown

We need tits and arse because they have got to be available to us; to be pawed, fucked, wanked over. Because we're men? No. Because we're consumers. Because those are things we like, things we intrinsically feel or have been conned into believing will give us value, release satisfaction. We value them so we need to at least have the illusion of their availability. For tits and arse read coke, crisps, speedboats, cars, houses, computers, designer labels, replica shirts. That's why advertising and pornography are similar; they sell the illusion of availability and the non-consequence of consumption. — Irvine Welsh

I know in London a Welsh hairdresser who has striven so vehemently to abolish his accent that he sounds like a man speaking with the Elgin marbles in his mouth. — Dylan Thomas

Everyone in the valleys knew me and because of that, so many people used my name in the valleys that there must have been at least a hundred times a night that the name 'Malcolm Price' was used. — Stephen Richards

A serious student of any instrument who really worked hard could usually learn to play that instrument at the 85 percent level, no matter what the difficulties, he told her, but the last 15 percent on any instrument requires "something out of the ordinary" from a player. — Mary Sue Welsh

Spud has two expressions: totally-scoobied-as-to-what-the-fuck's-going-on and the constantly-on-the-verge-of-tears look he is currently deploying. Assailed with self pity and self loathing, regarding his folly in sitting next to Begbie, he glances around. - Aye ... it's bad, like say, he concedes, wondering how he can manoeuvre into another seat. — Irvine Welsh

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. — Richard Rodriguez

I am Welsh and the rest is propaganda. — Alun Richards

I think the French agonise more about being French, I don't think English think about being English that much. I think the Scottish think about being Scottish and the Welsh think about being Welsh, but the English don't really care. But the French think about it all the time, it's an absolute preoccupation. — Jonathan Meades

But the nation's business must go forward, and this is how: an act to give Wales members of Parliament, and make English the language of the law courts, and to cut from under them the powers of the lords of the Welsh marches. — Hilary Mantel

The wiry man scratched his head, looked the two inquisitors up and down and cleared his throat softly. "We must be quick." He turned to go, pulling his cloak over his head and shuffling through the door into the moonlight. The two inquisitors moved with impossible silence behind, floating across the straw-covered floor like the cats on the walls outside the hut. The cats froze at the disturbance before scurrying noiselessly into the shadows as the three silhouettes crossed the ten yards of grass before the blackness of the forest swallowed them. No fires flickered at this time, when the full moon was highest in the cloudless summer sky, and the three were the only waking souls in the hamlet. — Gregory Figg

You can only live in the world you ken. The rest is just wishful thinking or paranoia. — Irvine Welsh

I was shocked by the amount of Welsh people in L.A. We'd go to this British pub to watch the 'Six Nations' early in the morning and I remember the first time I walked in it was just a sea of red. — Matthew Rhys

The less one does, as I long ago observed, the less one can find time to do. — Jane Welsh Carlyle

Choose a life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers ... Choose DSY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit crushing game shows, stucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away in the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself, choose your future. Choose life ... But why would I want to do a thing like that? — Irvine Welsh

My ears hurt as if being tugged upon by pliers - yet I welcome the pain, as it heralds the completion of my journey to reunite with my Welsh ancestors. I hear them clearly now:
We be *Tylwyth Teg*, the Fair Folk. We be your kinsfolk. *Mae ein gwaed yn eich gwaed*. Our blood is your blood. We be the Dea-kinsmen. Magick is our way. — Horton Deakins

Use the noble gifts which God has given you! — Jane Welsh Carlyle

Sometimes there's a snobbery among literary types that these people don't really get it, but in a lot of ways they get it more than the literati. There's a culture in the background that they understand and know. They get that deeper level. — Irvine Welsh

Some who were not yet ready to venture into the chapel on Sundays might well put in their first appearance on a Saturday night to see what Y dyn bach ('the little man') had got to say. (The Welsh term has an element of affection in it not obvious in the English) — Iain H. Murray

[...] but it's aw hate, hate, hate wi some punters, and whair does it git us likesay, man? Whair the fuck does it git us? — Irvine Welsh

Welsh is my mother tongue, and my children speak it. If you come and live in this community you'll work out pretty quickly that it's beneficial to learn the language, because if you're going to the pub or a cafe you need to be a part of the local life. — Bryn Terfel

Welsh women aren't the most tactile unless they're your relatives. And then you don't want them to be. — Rhys Ifans

He said "They were heartily welcome to his poor cottage", and turning to Mr. Didapper, cried out, 'Non mea renidet in domo lacunar.' The beau answered, "He did not understand Welsh"; at which the parson stared and made no reply. — Henry Fielding

The Welsh have everywhere adopted the Cymric tongue; they hug themselves in the belief that they are pure descendants of the ancient Britons, but in fact, they are rather Silurians than Celts. — Sabine Baring-Gould

My mum's family are from Blaenau Ffestiniog, the slate town. My grandfather was Elis Humphreys Roberts, so that's quite Welsh isn't it? — Simon Fowler

She led them to their pallets, again encircled by other pallets. She sat down, sighing at her aching muscles, and caught his gaze. "You may, er, wrap your arms around me if that will make you feel I am safer."
He chuckled--a hoarse chuckle, rusty, but a chuckle nonetheless. She'd take it.
"May I indeed?" He lay beside her and pulled her back against him, settling her head on his arm, bunching the other hide up to use as a pillow. "If I must." His warm sigh tickled across her neck. "After all, I must ensure that pinkie does not wander."
Would Robert never let her forget that? — Angela Quarles

The only thing I can cook is Welsh rarebit. — Ian Rush

He started with his shirt. Inside he was laughing at himself as he undid each button. Chris Welsh, male stripper. But the look in her eyes made him feel like the most potent, desired man on the planet. — Ellen Connor

History repeated itself. The 'don't do the things I did' mantra was tiresome posh. The best way to make sure your children don't grow up as cunts is not to be one yourself - or not to let them SEE you being one. This is easier as a sober artist in Santa Barbara than as an alcoholic jailbird in Leith. — Irvine Welsh

It shouldn't have happened at all, but their friendship had been cemented in only the time it took to get to school that morning - Adam demonstrating how to fasten the Camaro's ground wire more securely, Gansey lifting Adam's bike halfway into the trunk so they could ride to school together, Adam confessing he worked at a mechanic's to put himself through Aglionby, and Gansey turning to the passenger seat and asking, What do you know about Welsh kings? — Maggie Stiefvater

Remember, I was only in to fighting; I wasn't a high-ranking underworld figure selling the Crown Jewels! I wasn't the Merthyr Mafia and I had no connections with the goings on of petty criminal matters. — Stephen Richards

At 1:00 a.m., they were in the Welsh pub again, having drinks and talking opera and football. — John Grisham

She flapped her hands, anxious energy coursing through her. "How can you be so calm?"
He got to his feet, unfolding with an easy grace. He held out a hand, his dark eyes focused solemnly on hers. "Come with me."
"For what?"
"That's part of the lesson." Was it her imagination, or did a twinkle of humor stir in those eyes? "Center yourself, and grab onto the here and now."
That made no sense - what was he now, Sir Medieval Zen Master? But she slipped her hand into his strong, calloused one. He hauled her up until she bumped into his chest. With a finger under her chin, he tilted her face until she looked in his eyes.
"Listen to the world around you. Hear the birds? Hear the small animals scurrying? You are in this moment, this moment only, and sometimes that's all you can do, all you can be." His finger pulled away, brushing against her skin, and he tapped her nose, stepping away. — Angela Quarles

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