Hiraeth Quotes

hiraeth (n): a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home that maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for lost places in your past

Hiraeth: a homesickness for a home you can’t return to or that never was.

hiraeth, a Welsh word that means a homesickness for a home you cannot return to, or that maybe never was; it means nostalgia and yearning and grief for lost places.

Rhys absorbed that with chagrin. "No one has ever accused me of being a romantic," he said ruefully. "If you were, how would you propose?" He thought for a moment. "I would begin by teaching you a Welsh word. Hiraeth There's no equivalent in English." "Hiraeth," she repeated, trying to pronounce it with a tapped R, as he had. "Aye. It's a longing for something that was lost, or never existed. You feel it for a person or a place, or a time in your life...it's a sadness of the soul. Hiraeth calls to a Welshman even when he's closest to happiness, reminding him that he's incomplete." Her brow knit with concern. "Do you feel that way?" "Since the day I was born." He looked down into her small, lovely face. "But not when I'm with you. That's why I want to marry you.

Hiraeth: homesickness for something that never was and never could be.

Hiraeth!” Poppy cries, and claps her hands. “Do you know this Welsh word? It’s a feeling not easily translated into words. A deep longing for home, a nostalgia—a yearning—for the place that calls to your soul.

Hiraeth is a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return, a home which maybe never was. It is the nostalgia, the yearning, the grief for the lost places of your past. I’ve always thought of it as the saddest entry in the dictionary.

Hiraeth: a Welsh word that means a homesickness for a home you cannot return to, or maybe never was; it means nostalgia and yearning and grief for lost places.

In the Welsh language there is a particularly beautiful word: ‘Hiraeth’. It has no direct English translation, but the general sense of the term is an overwhelming feeling of grief and longing for one’s people and land of the past, a kind of amplified spiritual homesickness for a place one has never been to.

…we can only hope that the evocative Welsh word hiraeth will be preserved. It means ‘distant pain’, and I know all about it…But, and this is important, it always refers to a near-umbilical attachment to a place, not just free-floating nostalgia or a droopy houndlike wistfulness of the longing we associate with human love. No, this is a word about the pain of loving a place.

Hiraeth,” she repeated, trying to pronounce it with a tapped R, as he had. “Aye. There's no equivalent in English. It's a longing for something that was lost, or never existed. You feel it for a person or a place, or a time in your life... it's a sadness of the soul. Hiraeth calls to a Welshman even when he's closest to happiness, reminding him that he's incomplete.” Her brow knit with concern. “Do you feel that way?” “Since the day I was born. But not when I'm with you. That's why I want to marry you.

This perhaps is what is meant by hiraeth: a lifelong yearning for what is gona and out of reach.

Do you know that high fever which invades us in our cold suffering, that aching for a land we do not know, that anguish of curiosity? There is a country which resembles you, where everything is beautiful, sumptuous, authentic, still, where fantasy has built and adorned a western China, where life is sweet to breathe, where happiness is wed to silence. That is where to live, that is where to die!" - Invitation to a Voyage

The world was whole then, the sun and moon together as one.

My whole life, I’ve felt I was homesick for somewhere I’d never known.’ She told me that in Britain, where she grew up, the Celts called it ‘hiraeth’—a longing for home.

hiraeth. She’s said it was a Welsh word that meant homesickness for a home you can never return to or that never was.

Hiraeth,’ Aled repeated. ‘It sort of means longing. Wistfulness. Yearning, tinged with nostalgia. It’s like a special, specifically Welsh homesickness, muddled with grief for lost things that can’t ever come back.

Are you familiar with the word hiraeth?” I asked. Her expression turned to a frown. “I’ve never heard of it.” “I just learned of it myself. It’s a Welsh word, it means a sad longing; a homesickness for something you can never return to.

The Greek word “nostalgia” derives from the root nostros, meaning “return home,” and algia, meaning “longing.” Doctors in seventeenth-century Europe considered nostalgia an illness, like the flu, mainly suffered by displaced migrant servants, soldiers, and job seekers, and curable through opium, leeches, or, for the affluent, a journey to the Swiss Alps. Throughout time, such feeling has been widely acknowledged. The Portuguese have the term saudade. The Russians have toska. The Czechs have litost. Others too name the feeling: for Romanians, it’s dor, for Germans, it’s heimweh. The Welsh have hiraeth, the Spanish mal de corazon. Many

So I went to bed, full, happy, and caring nothing for all the hurt of all the englished Welshmen that ever festered upon a proud land

Somehow the moon still remained, shining its wary life on the world, filled with pain and dread and unspoken secrets.

He would choose being alone over being lonely in a crowd.

Taking her left hand, he began to slide the moonstone onto her finger, and hesitated. "How did I propose the first time?" He had been nervous, steeling himself for a possible refusal; he could hardly remember a word he'd said. Amusement tugged at her lips. "You laid out the advantages on both sides, and explained the ways in which our future goals were compatible." Rhys absorbed that with chagrin. "No one has ever accused me of being a romantic," he said ruefully. "If you were, how would you propose?" He thought for a moment. "I would begin by teaching you a Welsh word. Hiraeth. There's no equivalent in English." "Hiraeth," she repeated, trying to pronounce it with a tapped R, as he had. "Aye. It's a longing for something that was lost, or never existed. You feel it for a person or a place, or a time in your life... it's a sadness of the soul. Hiraeth calls to a Welshman even when he's closest to happiness, reminding him that he's incomplete." Her brow knit with concern. "Do you feel that way?" "Since the day I was born." He looked down into her small, lovely face. "But not when I'm with you. That's why I want to marry you." Helen smiled. She reached up to curl her hand around the back of his neck, her caress as light as silk gauze being pulled across his skin. Standing on her toes, she drew his head down and kissed him. Her lips were smoother than petals, all clinging silk and tender dampness. He had the sensation of surrendering, some terrible soft sweetness evading him and rearranging his insides. Breaking the kiss, Helen lowered back to her heels. "Your proposals are improving," she told him, and extended her hand as he fumbled to slide the ring onto her finger.

But I went on thinking about false teeth, and then about piano-keys and about that time the blind man from Martinique came to tune the piano and then he played and we listened to him sitting in the dark with the jalousies shut because it was pouring with rain and my father said, 'You are a real musician.' He had a red moustache, my father. And Hester was always saying, 'Poor Gerald, poor Gerald.' But if you'd seen him walking up Market Street, swinging his arms and with his brown shoes flashing in the sun, you wouldn't have been sorry for him. That time when he say, 'The Welsh word for grief is hiraeth.' Hiraeth. And that time when I was crying about nothing and I thought he'd be wild, but he hugged me up and he didn't say anything. I had on a coral brooch and it got crushed. He hugged me up and then he said, 'I believe you're going to be like me, you poor little devil.' And that time when Mr Crowe said, 'You don't mean to say you're backing up that damned French monkey?' meaning the Governor, 'I've met some Englishmen,' he said, 'who were monkeys too.

Hiraeth (n.) Homesickness for a home you can’t return to, or that never was

He taught her one of her favorite words: hiraeth, a Welsh word that means a homesickness for a home you cannot return to, or that maybe never was; it means nostalgia and yearning and grief for lost places.

Hiraeth...'It's this deep longing for a home that never was. An ailment hat brings both a sense of estrangement and a haunting familiarity." --The Music of the Ghosts, p.144

Hiraeth: el sentimiento de nostalgia hacia un hogar que nunca fue tuyo

Hiraeth, calling upon the wistful and beautiful Welsh word that described the bittersweet longing for lost places and persons—those either real or having never existed at all.

And it would be worse to tell him the deeper, more painful truth: that seeing Hiraeth had ruined her childish fantasy, ruined the version of Myrddin she had constructed in her mind, one where he was benevolent and wise and had written a book meant to save girls like her.

I have been a refugee for the last forty years in the luminous land of opportunity. Still my heart is aching with hiraeth for my native land.

Saudade—originating in Portuguese and Galician—takes hiraeth another step, though. It is often defined as "the love that remains" after someone or someplace is gone—or even if that person or place is still in your life, but it has changed so much that you mourn the past or future.

I initially discovered hiraeth on social media, and it made me suck in my breath as something stirred deep within me. It's Welsh, and there's no direct translation into English, but it's defined as a kind of homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over a person or place that is lost to you. It carries with it a sense of longing, nostalgia and wistfulness,

As the sky unveils the path, may every step I take lead me closer to our fate.

As my wings bring back home, my soul calls out to the next adventure. Where will I find my heart next time or how far would I be willing to go?

There is a sacred Welsh word. A word, the Welsh tell me, that doesn't quite translate into English. The word is hiraeth. A wise friend from that land once said that the word refers to a particular kind of longing. "What kind of longing?" I asked. He paused, trying to find the words. "A longing for a place or time that the soul once knew.

Hiraeth, of course, is a long field with four corners: incompleteness, memory, imagination, and love. It all starts with love.

There’s no such thing as normal,” Barrons says. “You keep thinking that. You suffer hiraeth.” “Here-eyeth?” I echo. “A Welsh word that means unattainable longing for a place—or perhaps more accurately a state of being—that never existed. Nostalgia for something that never was.

Pummeling her pillow, she wondered if Ranulf understood about hiraeth. It translated as "longing," but meant so much more, the love of the Welsh for their homeland, a sense of belonging, pride in their past, why they did not thrive when uprooted, like plants set down in foreign soil. If Ranulf wanted them to live in England, she would offer no protest, for she would have followed him to Hell if need be. But it would be a life in exile.

I felt it deep in my bones, beyond the need for survival: the starvation for meaning, for purpose.

We're all in the same boat here, trying to survive.

I searched his warm eyes in a failed attempt to find a galaxy in them I hadn't already discovered.

Secretly, he hoped. He hoped, he hoped, he hoped. For now, that was enough.

We don't have time, okay? Don't be stupid," I snapped, frustrated. He leaned in, his eyes searching mine. "All we have is time.

In moments like these, we lose control. Our heart takes over, grows into something unstoppable.

Hiraeth! Poppy cries, and claps her hands. "Do you know this Welsh word? It's a feeling not easily translated into words. A deep longing for home, a nostalgia - a yearning - for the place that calls to your soul

When I slept, I thought about Llywelyn. And the first thoughts I had as I woke were of Llywelyn too. I couldn’t stop thinking about him, and it was starting to scare me. But I also couldn’t stop thinking about this little village, and when I checked my phone for the time and saw yet another missed call from my boss I wanted to cry, or shrivel up into a ball or… Or never leave. I knew it sounded stupid, even in my head. But I had found myself enjoying my time in Hiraeth more than I thought possible.

Love, feelings, all that mushy stuff—if it was ever real, it never goes away.

But only the saddest things can make us feel as deeply as we do.

It should’ve stopped him, to know that his enemies were encouraging him instead of fighting him, but he kept on going.

Live... What was it to live? How could we live, when Death was a shadow? How could we live, when we could hardly survive?

Where would they be without each other to hold, to cling onto when the other was falling? Who else would grab and pull the hand of the other who was slipping down a dark hole, with no one else to understand them?

And finally, they were Home.

He wanted to feel ashamed, but he didn't feel anything. He felt nothing. He was numb.

In the end, love, if real, cannot die.

I watch you and I think I'm in love.

I'm here', the sun seemed to say, 'I'm right here'.

He hugged her once more to remind himself that he was still alive, and that he wasn't alone.

Secrets bind us down yet set us free. Love is like that, too.

You shine in the dark, and that's harder to do than in the light.

It takes a strong, brilliant person to do that—to love the world after it wronged them, not just once but over and over again.

Love prevails.

How can you life others up when you're falling?

The feeling spreading through us, catching on fire like flames, was vast: It was that of freedom. It echoed through our lungs, tore through our hearts, carried our legs forward.

If truth is the best form of honor, success is the best form of justice.

It’s not that he wasn’t an effective soldier, but, whereas I had a propensity for getting wounded, it was like he had been my inspiration, my serious injury sensei.

I closed my eyes and leaned my head back to face the boundless sky above covered by the darkness of my eyelids, and asked for mercy when there was none; ask for justice where there was corruption; for fleeting light in the sinking darkness; for life when there was only death and an accompanying silence; for rain in the blazing fire, where flames rose and burned and became a paroxysm of war and peace, of beauty and ugliness, of arrival and departure, of the awakened and those asleep, of content and sorrow, of sun and moon.

I saw it. I saw the look in his eyes, and I was paralyzed.

And he had promised Theo that he would live. Promised. Promised something he never gave. It was broken, a lie told by fear of regret. Then again, what promise wasn’t?

I’m drowning, drowning above water. And that’s worse than drowning underwater, because no one knows how I struggle for a breath.

I don’t want to die before I get to live.

The tumbleweed told me he loved the Welsh word hiraeth, which—like many of the best words, it seemed—could not be fully translated into English. But hiraeth meant, loosely: yearning for a home that no longer exists, or maybe never existed at all. The musician said it was how he felt about me—like I was some long-lost home he hadn’t even known he had. I heard the sense of homecoming in his sentiment, more than the impossibility. But really hiraeth felt less like a description of our relationship and more like a description of the way I grieved my marriage: missing not what it had been, but what it hadn’t been—what we’d both hoped it would be.

Herrr – what, now? What does it mean?’ Rosie asked, on tenterhooks. ‘Hiraeth,’ Aled repeated. ‘It sort of means longing. Wistfulness. Yearning, tinged with nostalgia. It’s like a special, specifically Welsh homesickness, muddled with grief for lost things that can’t ever come back.

Down the river from the struggling village, a tiny house sat at the edge of a massive forest, shrouded in the shadows of oak, pine, and flowering dogwood. There wasn’t much on this farm, the land hard and difficult to till, but it’s all they had. They grew potatoes, the tubers somehow able to survive, the father a scowling presence in all of his height and bluster; the mother always in another room, busy with anything else; the boy forever expanding the hole that grew inside his chest. (Hiraeth)

There is a Welsh word, hiraeth, which means a nostalgia for a place to which you cannot return. A new word, solastalgia, coined in the late Anthropocene, means a yearning for a landscape that no longer exists.

Hiraeth – ‘is a Welsh concept of longing for home. “Hiraeth” is a word which cannot be completely translated, meaning more than solely “missing something” or “missing home”. It implies missing a time, an era, or a person, including homesickness for what may not exist any longer.

hiraeth.

hiraeth’ for a home