Robert Aickman Quotes

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

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.

There's something wrong… There's something wrong with almost everything.

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

Answers are almost always insufficient. They are almost always misleading.

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

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.

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

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

Things only exist as long as you see them. And we are all of us nothing but the sum of our moods.

The sheer oddity of life seems to me of more and more importance, because more and more the pretense is that life is charted, predictable, and controllable.

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

The first step towards mastering time is always to make time meaningless

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.

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

I find that I have been scribbling away for nearly an hour. Miss Gisborne keeps on saying that I am too prone to the insertion of unnecessary hyphens, and that it is a weakness. If a weakness it is, I intend to cherish it.

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.

...Though it may not be a suitable comment for even this confidential record, I thought, by no means for the first time in such surroundings, what an odd way it was for people of opposite sexes to spend the evening, when, after all, there was nothing ahead that any of us could be sure of but infirmity, illness, and death.

Confidences pre-announced are seldom worth while.

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

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

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

. . . he seemed to have been driving for hours . . . going round and round in large or small circles, asking the way and being unable to understand the answers (when answers were vouchsafed), all the time seemingly more off-course than ever.

It is almost as if the nearer one approaches to a thing, the less it proves to be there, to exist at all.

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

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

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.

It is amazing how full a life a man can lead without for one moment being alive at all, except sometimes when sleeping.

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.

Things mechanical are like the ladies,' continued Toby. 'You need to understand their ways. If you understand them, they'll do what you want from the start. If you don't, they've got you. And then God help you.

But there's one problem that you have to solve if you're to go on profiting from books, and books won't help you much to solve it [,,,] The problem of finding someone, even one single person, you can endure life with. To me it's acute.