Quotes from Phil Rickman

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?

It's only religion. Faith is faith, but religions are no better than the people who practise them.

The door of the judge's house was opened to him by a huge, bearded man who informed the reporter in a conversational tone that if he did not leave the village immediately he would not leave it with his arms unbroken.

She'd long ago given up trying to visualize God. There was no He or She. This was a Presence higher than gender, race or religion, transcending identity. All she would ever hope to do was follow the lamplit path into a place within and yet beyond her own heart and stay there and wait, patient and passive and without forced piety.

Ancient people, we don't just need to find out what things they made, how they lived. We need to see through their eyes, sense what they sensed… aware that their senses would have been much sharper than ours… accepting that they might well have been aware of things we no longer perceive.

Nothing drives people to loony extremes more than religion and national pride.

no religion run by human beings should ever be trusted.

Stood there in the moonlight – so much light from such a slender moon – and watched her dying like an October butterfly

Hate the way if people have a problem they type it into their computers, and scream it out to the world and wait for the world to give them stupid, dangerous advice.

How much more of this? Merrily sat down in a chair at the end of the back row, feeling as though she'd been mugged. Fragments of faith scattered like credit cards in the gutter.

The enigmatic Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins. And the worst offender: J. M. Powys's The Old Golden Land, which suggested that the border country was full of 'secret doorways', through which you could penetrate 'ancient mysteries'.

It was the way things were going. People realizing how little time they had left to get rich before the planet melted.

No wonder most people kept it entirely out of their lives, turned a blind eye to otherworldly mysteries, embraced scepticism. And also atheism because any kind of god was just confusing. Take all this stuff away and your life would slowly become rational.

Snow is for the Christmas cards," Bethan said. "You won't find a country person who likes it.

All I do know is that extremism of any kind has never taken root in Bridelow, where a practical paganism and a humble Christianity have comfortably linked hands for so long. Many

Now he'd been forced back on the inhalers, expectorants and headache pills produced by fiendish pharmaceutical multinationals which, he was convinced, directed a meaningful element of their astronomical profits into the development of new and virulent strains of influenza.

He's dominant, lass. We've all known people who can make you do things for them and go on doing things until you become ill.

The soldier talks, guardedly, as some soldiers do,

to organic. Well… that wasn't going to happen.

Because therapy, Laurence, is the religion of the new millennium. And we're the priests.

FOR THE SHORTEST month, drab February can last for ever.

Sometimes,' Mr Unsworth said, 'one wants to be influenced by places. Sometimes not.

Then the true essence of the place came to him,

Sliding on to a very public bench, dead centre of Ross. He was feeling heavy but insubstantial, like vinegar-soaked fish and chip paper tossed from a passing car.