Robert Aickman Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

The first step towards mastering time is always to make time meaningless — Robert Aickman

And as their love had begun a little before a quotation, so it ended a little after one. — Robert Aickman

No milk. It is black coffee, pure but strong, that fortifies against the powers of darkness with which the world is filled. — 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

Ursula excelled me without difficulty in swimming, sailing, and fell-walking alike. Marriage had sheered off the first edge of romance from our actual caresses, but there was a sweet affection between us, as between a devoted brother and a devoted sister, though I suppose that is not an approved way of putting it. I always wanted a sister, and never more than at this present moment. — Robert Aickman

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

It is strange that people train themselves so carefully to go to waste so prematurely — Robert Aickman

More secrets are improperly disclosed from boredom than from any other motive; — Robert Aickman

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

There are no beautiful houses in England now. Only ruins, mental homes, and Government offices. — Robert Aickman

You speak English beautifully, which means you can't be English. — Robert Aickman

At heart, women are creatures of darkness all the time. — Robert Aickman

Answers are almost always insufficient. They are almost always misleading. — Robert Aickman

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

Life, as we know it, could hardly continue if men did not soon slay the dreamer inside them — Robert Aickman

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

Elmo found, as have many, that the death of the heart corrupted the pen into writing a farrago of horrors and insanities, not necessarily the less true for their seeming extravagance, but inaccessible for the most part to the prudent. — Robert Aickman

There are no beautiful clocks. Everything to do with time is hideous. — Robert Aickman

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

They say there's nothing inside but emptiness,' Maureen told me later. I made no comment, but filled in by kissing her hair or something of the kind. Maureen had at that time rather droopy hair, possibly owing to lack of vitamins during the war, which she kept off her brow with a big tortoiseshell slide. Her brow was really beautiful, and so were her eyes. They had that gentle look of being unequal to life, which, as I later realised, always attracts me in a woman. — Robert Aickman

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

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

Human beings are compelled to massacre animals unceasingly, because human beings are simply unable to survive, for the most part, on apples and nuts. - Ravissante — Robert Aickman

Confidences pre-announced are seldom worth while. — Robert Aickman

You're an artist, Mel. You can't expect to be a success at the same time.' She was warming her white hands. I was not sure that I was an artist, but it was nice to be told. — 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

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

When you live entirely among madmen, it is difficult to know how sane you are. — Robert Aickman

find the right words for your troubles, and your troubles become half-joys. — Robert Aickman

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

Much to be preferred to boxing are fencing and revolver-practice, judo and study of poisons. — Robert Aickman