Robert Aickman > Quotes

“The first step towards mastering time is always to make time meaningless”
― Robert Aickman

“When you live entirely among madmen, it is difficult to know how sane you are.”
― Robert Aickman, Painted Devils: Strange Stories

“There are no beautiful clocks. Everything to do with time is hideous.”
― Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine

“The great prophetic work of the modern world is Goethe’s Faust, so little appreciated among the Anglo-Saxons. Mephistopheles offers Faust unlimited knowledge and unlimited power in exchange for his soul. Modern man has accepted that bargain. . . .

I believe in what the Germans term Ehrfurcht: reverence for things one cannot understand. Faust’s error was an aspiration to understand, and therefore master, things which, by God or by nature, are set beyond the human compass. He could only achieve this at the cost of making the achievement pointless. Once again, it is exactly what modern man has done.”
― Robert Aickman, The Collected Strange Stories Of Robert Aickman: I

“After all, that was a main purpose of science: to make things of all kinds happen sooner than they otherwise would.”
― Robert Aickman

“find the right words for your troubles, and your troubles become half-joys.”
― Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine

“It is strange that people train themselves so carefully to go to waste so prematurely”
― Robert Aickman, The Unsettled Dust

“You speak English beautifully, which means you can't be English.”
― Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea

“No milk. It is black coffee, pure but strong, that fortifies against the powers of darkness with which the world is filled.”
― Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea

“Things only exist as long as you see them. And we are all of us nothing but the sum of our moods.”
― Robert Aickman, Dark Entries

“Nothing is more lethal to the effect that a ghost story should make than for the author to provide alternative materialist solution. This reduces a poem to a puzzle and confines the reader’s spirit instead of enlarging it.”
― Robert Aickman

“Haven't you noticed by this time that everyone's lives are full of things you can't understand? The exceptional thing is the thing you can understand.”
― Robert Aickman, Dark Entries

“It is amazing how full a life a man can lead without for one moment being alive at all, except sometimes when sleeping.”
― Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea

“Confidences pre-announced are seldom worth while.”
― Robert Aickman, Dark Entries

“Dreams, Mrs. Sawyer, are misleading, because they make life seem real. When it loses the support of dreams, life dissolves.”
― Robert Aickman

“We are most of us two people, your Highness. There is something lacking in the man who is one thing only, and so, as he believes, at peace with the world and with himself.”
― Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories

“It is almost as if the nearer one approaches to a thing, the less it proves to be there, to exist at all.”
― Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories

“My dilemma is that of the civil servant. If a civil servant takes an initiative and things go right with it, he cannot, in the nature of his employment, look for much in the way of reward; whereas if his initiative goes wrong, he can expect all kinds of trouble, everything from reprimand to blocked promotion, and a permanent black mark against his name in the files. It is accepted, therefore, that the way to advance in the civil service, or in any field where civil service conditions prevail, is never take an initiative and never to support anyone else's. It is inevitable that this should be so.”
― Robert Aickman, The Unsettled Dust

“You must have noticed it is always too late when questions are answered and hopes fulfilled and sacrifices made and murder done. Because it is always later than you think.”
― Robert Aickman, Dark Entries

“Give up all the wild ideas that buzz round you like wasps. Or like bluebottles. […] Find a nice, ordinary girl, not too attractive or you’ll be jealous all the time, not too bright or you’ll be anxious all the time, not too rich or you’ll have nothing to strive for, not too original or she’ll upset people. There are plenty of them, and all of them are available to a young postman like you. Those are the terms offered.”

The terrier had come to a sudden standstill, as if he had been a white gun dog on one of the estates.

“You don’t live like that,” said Robin from the bed.

“I don’t live at all,” replied Rosetta. “Haven’t you realized?”

“Perhaps I have.” Now Robin was staring at her: momentarily still that muggy evening; for seconds rigid as the dog.

Rosetta smiled. “I am the person every postman meets in the end.”

“I’m a provisional postman only. I told you that clearly,” remarked Robin, starting once more to relax.

“Do what I tell you. What else is there for you? Only wasps and bluebottles.”
― Robert Aickman

“Answers are almost always insufficient. They are almost always misleading.”
― Robert Aickman

“One of my deep thoughts was that it is not so much particular disasters that make people cry, but something always there in life itself, something that a light falls on when we are trying to enjoy ourselves”
― Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine

“Conventions are, indeed, all that shield us from the shivering void, though often they do so but poorly and desperately.”
― Robert Aickman

“At heart, women are creatures of darkness all the time.”
― Robert Aickman, Dark Entries

“She put her arms round him and kissed him. The kiss remained always with him, an agony in the mind: for then the two of them at last met and recognised one another. Later he supposed that this was indeed a moment's perfect happiness for him; but at the time the thought did not occur. Everything but the sea was dark and quiet and timeless. Thought and feeling had stopped and they were immortal. The moment was immortal.”
― Robert Aickman, Dark Entries

“In the end I came to see that the true prophet of the modern world was Samuel Butler: when he suggested that the machine was an evolutionary development, destined to supersede man as the dominant species and reduce him to greenfly status, the status of machine-minder, homo mechanicus instead of homo sapiens; and to modify his nature accordingly.”
― Robert Aickman, The Attempted Rescue

“There seemed to be something in him that made him different from most of the people he encountered in the office or in the train or in the park or at the houses of others. He could not succeed in defining what this difference was, and he simultaneously despised and congratulated himself for having it. He would sincerely have liked to be rid of it, but at the same time was pretty sure it was the best thing about him.”
― Robert Aickman

“Enchanted islands are hard to understand,' he said. 'I've always thought that. It worried me even as a child. The trouble is that you can never be sure where the enchantment begins and where it ends.”
― Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea

“More secrets are improperly disclosed from boredom than from any other motive;”
― Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine

“Dr. Freud established that only a small part, perhaps one-tenth, of the human mental and emotional organization is conscious. Our main response to this discovery has been to reject the nine-tenths unconscious more completely and more systematically than ever before. The ghost story makes contact with the submerged nine-tenths.”
― Robert Aickman