Phil Rickman > Quotes

“It’s only religion. Faith is faith, but religions are no better than the people who practise them.”
― Phil Rickman, A Crown of Lights

“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, Mean Spirit

“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.”
― Phil Rickman, Candlenight

“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.”
― Phil Rickman, The Cure of Souls

“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.”
― Phil Rickman, Friends of the Dusk

“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.”
― Phil Rickman, The Secrets of Pain

“Stood there in the moonlight – so much light from such a slender moon – and watched her dying like an October butterfly”
― Phil Rickman, Candlenight

“no religion run by human beings should ever be trusted.”
― Phil Rickman, The Magus of Hay

“Seconds passed. If there’d been an old clock in here, its ticks would have sounded slow and menacing.”
― Phil Rickman, The Fever of the World

“Nothing drives people to loony extremes more than religion and national pride.”
― Phil Rickman, Candlenight

“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.”
― Phil Rickman, The House of Susan Lulham

“FOR THE SHORTEST month, drab February can last for ever.”
― Phil Rickman, Night After Night

“The soldier talks, guardedly, as some soldiers do,”
― Phil Rickman, Night After Night

“Because therapy, Laurence, is the religion of the new millennium. And we’re the priests.”
― Phil Rickman, The Cure of Souls

“how much in life was really worth getting on with? Where was it leading?”
― Phil Rickman, A Crown of Lights

“Sometimes,’ Mr Unsworth said, ‘one wants to be influenced by places. Sometimes not.”
― Phil Rickman, The Fever of the World

“to organic. Well… that wasn’t going to happen.”
― Phil Rickman, All of a Winter's Night

“Snow is for the Christmas cards,” Bethan said. “You won’t find a country person who likes it.”
― Phil Rickman, Candlenight

“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.”
― Phil Rickman, Friends of the Dusk

“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’.”
― Phil Rickman, Curfew

“yellow JCB.”
― Phil Rickman, To Dream of the Dead

“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.”
― Phil Rickman, Mean Spirit

“To dream of the dead is a sign of rain.”
― Phil Rickman, To Dream of the Dead

“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.”
― Phil Rickman, The Fever of the World

“All I know is that nowt reignites faster than the lamp of the wicked.”
― Phil Rickman, The Lamp of the Wicked

“All the things that might have been. Everything changing before you were ready, like pages of a favourite book ripped out to reveal a different story and new characters you were supposed to relate to instantly, the old ones suddenly gone for ever.”
― Phil Rickman, The Lamp of the Wicked

“Lots of archaeology. Most of it hidden. Overgrown castle mounds and tumps. And hill forts. No official history – like no National Trust stuff, but it’s all around you, unlabelled. You need to know what you’re looking for. I like that.”
― Phil Rickman, Friends of the Dusk

“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”
― Phil Rickman, The Man in the Moss

“I am not proselytizing on behalf of ghosts. You can lead a full, happy and useful life without believing in them. But I should like to point out that scepticism is largely a negative matter. People do not believe in ghosts because they have never come across them. Diana Norman
The Stately Ghosts of England (1963)”
― Phil Rickman, Night After Night

“Congleton.”
― Phil Rickman, The Man in the Moss