Short Story Writers From Wales

"We don’t aspire to genetic unity, no matter what your propagandists think. The pursuit of optima leads only to local minima. We honour our errors. We actively seek persistent disequilibrium."

"“Tell me, scientist to scientist, do you honestly think it will work?” “We won’t know until we try,” Naqi said. Any other answer would have been politically hazardous: too much optimism and the politicians would have started asking just why the expensive project was needed in the first place. Too much pessimism and they would ask exactly the same question."

"A single data point—even a single clutch of measurements—could not usually prove or disprove anything, but it might later turn out to play a vital role in a chain of argument, even if it was only in the biasing of some statistical distribution closer to one hypothesis than another. Science, as Naqi had long since realised, was as much a swarming, social process as it was something driven by ecstatic moments of personal discovery. It was something she was proud to be part of."

"The Jugglers store patterns, but they seldom show any sign of comprehending actual content. We’re dealing with a mindless biological archiving system, a museum without a curator."

"I had never understood mathematics with any great agility, but now I sensed it as a hard grid of truth underlying everything: bones shining through the thin flesh of the world."

"Even time travel becomes normal when it’s your day job."

"Maybe if you weren’t busy throwing rocks at each other, you could spend a little time on the other niceties of life, such as cooperation and mutual advancement."

"“So you've no qualms.” “Qualms?” Merlin set down the papers he had been leafing through. “I've so many qualms they’re in danger of self-organizing. I occasionally have a thought that isn’t a qualm. But I’ll tell you this. Sometimes you just have to do the obvious thing. They have an item I need, and there’s a favor I can do for them. It’s that simple. Not everything in the universe is a riddle.”"

"“But you seem so nonchalant about it all,” Teal said. Merlin pondered this for a few seconds. “Do you think being not nonchalant would make any difference? I don't know that it would. We’re here in the moment, aren’t we? And the moment will have its way with us, no matter how we feel about things.” “Fatalist.” “Cheerful realist. There’s a distinction.”"

"It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible."

"Language, he understood, was chiefly important for the beauty of its sounds, by its possession of words resonant, glorious to the ear, by its capacity, when- exquisitely arranged, of suggesting wonderful and indefinable impressions, perhaps more ravishing and farther removed from the domain of strict thought than the impressions excited by music itself."

"Mr. Machen, with an impressionable Celtic heritage linked to keen youthful memories of the wild domed hills, archaic forests, and cryptical Roman ruins of the Gwent countryside, has developed an imaginative life of rare beauty, intensity, and historic background. He has absorbed the mediæval mystery of dark woods and ancient customs, and is a champion of the Middle Ages in all things—including the Catholic faith. He has yielded, likewise, to the spell of the Britanno-Roman life which once surged over his native region; and finds strange magic in the fortified camps, tessellated pavements, fragments of statues, and kindred things which tell of the day when classicism reigned and Latin was the language of the country."

"Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen; author of some dozen tales long and short, in which the elements of hidden horror and brooding fright attain an almost incomparable substance and realistic acuteness. Mr. Machen, a general man of letters and master of an exquisitely lyrical and expressive prose style, has perhaps put more conscious effort into his picaresque Chronicles Of Clemendy, his refreshing essays, his vivid autobiographical volumes, his fresh and spirited translations, and above all his memorable epic of the sensitive æsthetic mind, The Hill Of Dreams, in which the youthful hero responds to the magic of that ancient Welsh environment which is the author's own, and lives a dream-life in the Roman city of Isca Silurum, now shrunk to the relic-strown village of Cærleon-on-Usk. But the fact remains that his powerful horror-material of the nineties and earlier nineteen-hundreds stands alone in its class, and marks a distinct epoch in the history of this literary form."

"I can fancy what you saw. Yes; it is horrible enough; but after all, it is an old story, an old mystery played in our day and in dim London streets instead of amidst the vineyards and the olive gardens. We know what happened to those who chanced to meet the Great God Pan, and those who are wise know that all symbols are symbols of something, not of nothing. It was, indeed, an exquisite symbol beneath which men long ago veiled their knowledge of the most awful, most secret forces which lie at the heart of all things; forces before which the souls of men must wither and die and blacken, as their bodies blacken under the electric current. Such forces cannot be named, cannot be spoken, cannot be imagined except under a veil and a symbol, a symbol to the most of us appearing a quaint, poetic fancy, to some a foolish, silly tale. But you and I, at all events, have known something of the terror that may dwell in the secret place of life, manifested under human flesh; that which is without form taking to itself a form. Oh, Austin, how can it be? How is it that the very sunlight does not turn to blackness before this thing, the hard earth melt and boil beneath such a burden?"

"You see the mountain, and hill following after hill, as wave on wave, you see the woods and orchard, the fields of ripe corn, and the meadows reaching to the reed-beds by the river. You see me standing here beside you, and hear my voice; but I tell you that all these things — yes, from that star that has just shone out in the sky to the solid ground beneath our feet — I say that all these are but dreams and shadows; the shadows that hide the real world from our eyes. There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these 'chases in Arras, dreams in a career,' beyond them all as beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted that veil; but I do know, Clarke, that you and I shall see it lifted this very night from before another's eyes. You may think this all strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means. They called it seeing the god Pan."

"The psycho-analyst infers the monstrous and abnormal from a trifle; it is often safe to reverse the process. If a man dreams that he has committed a sin before which the sun hid his face, it is often safe to conjecture that, in sheer forgetfulness, he wore a red tie, or brown boots with evening dress."

"Here then is the pattern in my carpet, the sense of the eternal mysteries, the eternal beauty hidden beneath the crust of common and commonplace things; hidden and yet burning and glowing continually if you care to look with purged eyes."

"All this slowness, all this hardness, The nearness that is waiting in my bed, The gradual self-effacement of the dead."

"And we talked of girls, and dropping bombs on Rome, And thought of the quiet dead and the loud celebrities Exhorting us to slaughter."

"I am more and more engrossed with the single poetic theme of Life and Death, for there doesn't seem to be any question more directly relevant than this one of what survives of all the beloved."

"So we must say Goodbye, my darling, And go, as lovers go, for ever; Tonight remains, to pack and fix on labels And make an end of lying down together."

"Who is it climbs the summit of the road? Only the beggar bumming his dark load. Who was it cried to see the falling star? Only the landless soldier lost in war. And did a thousand years go by in vain? And does another thousand start again?"

"The dwarf barefooted, chanting Behind the oxen by the lake, Stepping lightly and lazily among the thorntrees Dusky and dazed with sunlight, half awake;The women breaking stones upon the highway, Walking erect with burdens on their heads, One body growing in another body, Creation touching verminous straw beds.Across scorched hills and trampled crops The soldiers straggle by. History staggers in their wake. The peasants watch them die."

"It is only when death releases the true poet from the embarrassing condition of being at once immortal and alive in the flesh that the people are prepared to honour him; and his spirit as it passes is saluted by a spontaneous display of public emotion. This explains the heavy black headlines in the Press of March 1944: ALUN LEWIS THE POET IS DEAD. Search the back-files and you will find no preparatory announcement: ALUN LEWIS WRITES GREAT POETRY."

"He was a poet of great power, who described the loneliness of military life in the early Forties with unique eloquence and accuracy; he wrote, too, exciting and original love poetry."

"Not one single action you voluntarily make - in body or soul - stays within itself. It lasts forever. A full-stop can't be placed at the end, for there is no end."

"fratolish hiang perpetshki"

"Let government legislate so as to restore to the Welsh speaker that most elementary of human rights - the right to use one's own language in one's own country on all occasions; without this, there can be no true democracy."

""Let the language which is on the tongues of our children be treated by our people with that reverence, that love and that care which civilized communities bestow on the most precious of their national treasures.”"

"Canys mae tystiolaeth ein pobol wedi'i Phrydeinio - gan gofio mai cyfystyron yw "Seisnig" a "Phrydeinig," bellach. Yn gyfrwys, yn graff, yn gwbl fwriadol, Prydeiniwyd tystiolaeth ein pobol."

"Enillwn y Fro Gymraeg, ac fe enillir Cymru, ac oni enillir y Fro Gymraeg, nid Cymru a enillir.'"

"It is only the right of conquest (derived from military success) which gives the Crown of England any illusion of sovereignty over Wales and the north of Ireland."

"And teachers will be promoted from being the deliverers of facts to being being guides - guiding their peoples through rich and valued experiences offered by the computer."

"What effect will all this have on education? First of all, teaching computer skill will be more important - much more important - than teaching children lists of facts. The computer will become the child's memory."

"The computer makes it posible to create a central information centre of all human achievements; and for any individual, from the comfort of his own home, to interrogate that information. For example, you would like to see a picture of the tallest horse? Then before your last finger clicks the last button that photograph will be up on your screen, in your own home."

"The effectiveness of my actions are unimportant. Total success is unimportant. The only element of importance is that I - slave to my surroundings - did everything I could... Two minutes to go. Indoctrination?"

"Shaw's association with Fabianism is of great importance, for it marks the confluence of two traditions which had been formerly separate and even opposed. Fabianism, in the orthodox person of Sidney Webb, is the direct inheritor of the spirit of John Stuart Mill; that is to say, of an utilitarianism refined by experience of a new situation in history. Shaw, on the other hand, is the direct successor of the spirit of Carlyle and of Ruskin, but he did not go the way of his elder successor, William Morris."

"If from poetry we expect a succession of signals for the release of miscellaneous private emotion we are likely to find Tears, Idle Tears valuable."

"We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned."

"The most advanced socialist thought in England is Raymond Williams’ superbly intricate and persuasive work... Any English Marxism will have to measure itself against this landmark in our social thought."

"There has never been a time, until the last fifty years, when a majority of any population had regular and constant access to drama, and used this access. . . . It seems probable that in societies like Britain and the United States more drama is watched in a week or weekend, by the majority of viewers, than would have been watched in a year or in some cases a lifetime in any previous historical period. It is clearly one of the unique characteristics of advanced industrial societies that drama as an experience is now an intrinsic part of everyday life, at a quantitative level which is so very much greater than any precedent as to seem a fundamental qualitative change. Whatever the social and cultural reasons may finally be, it is clear that watching dramatic simulation of a wide range of experiences is now an essential part of our modern cultural pattern."

"Real independence is a time of new and active creation: people sure enough of themselves to discard their baggage; knowing the past is past, as shaping history, but with a new confident sense of the present and the future, where the decisive meanings and values will be made."

"It is as if a really secure nationalism, already in possession of its nation-state, can fail to see itself as 'nationalist' at all. Its own distinctive bonding is perceived as natural and obvious by contrast with the mere projections of any nationalism which is still in active progress and thus incomplete. At this point radicals and minority nationalists emphasize the artificialities of the settled 'common sense' nation-state and to their own satisfaction shoot them to pieces from history and from social theory."

"It is then in making hope practical, rather than despair convincing, that we must resume and change and extend our campaigns."

"Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language."

"The gap between our feelings and our social observation is dangerously wide."

"Every aspect of personal life is radically affected by the quality of general life, and yet the general life is seen at its most important in completely personal terms."

"My own view is that if, in a socialist society, the basic cultural skills are made widely available, and the channels of communication widened and cleared, as much as possible has been done in the way of preparation, and what then emerges will be an actual response to the whole reality, and so valuable."

"The shaping influence of economic change can of course be distinguished, as most notably in the period with which this book is concerned. But the difficulty lies in estimating the final importance of a factor which never, in practice, appears in isolation."

"I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words."