Top 35 Robert Aickman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The first step towards mastering time is always to make time meaningless.”

— Robert Aickman

2. “You speak English beautifully, which means you can’t be English.”

— Robert Aickman

3. “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

4. “Life, as we know it, could hardly continue if men did not soon slay the dreamer inside them.”

— Robert Aickman

5. “It is strange that people train themselves so carefully to go to waste so prematurely.”

— Robert Aickman

6. “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

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

— Robert Aickman

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

— Robert Aickman

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

— Robert Aickman

10. “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

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

— Robert Aickman

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

— Robert Aickman

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

— Robert Aickman

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

— Robert Aickman

15. “Even the most normal people teeter all their lives along a narrow line between good and evil; between impulse and judgement, as we may say. Sleep does two things for the normal person. It gives him constant, long periods of respite from the conflict. It also enables his impulses to find a certain fulfilment in dreams, especially his most lawless impulses.”

— Robert Aickman

16. “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

17. “Everything to do with time is hideous.”

— Robert Aickman

18. “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

19. “It was still the long-drawn-out preliminary to a storm; the tedious, imperfect dispersal of the accumulated energy of the summer.”

— Robert Aickman

20. “Answers are almost always insufficient. They are almost always misleading.”

— Robert Aickman

21. “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

22. “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

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

— Robert Aickman

24. “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

25. “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

26. “And as their love had begun a little before a quotation, so it ended a little after one.”

— Robert Aickman

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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.”

— Robert Aickman

30. “Distraught as I was, I now realised that the scrabbling sound was connected with the tearing to pieces of Dr Tessler’s books. But it was the wheezy, throaty cry of the creature which most turned my heart and sinews to water. Or to steel.”

— Robert Aickman

31. “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

32. “Confidences pre-announced are seldom worth while.”

— Robert Aickman

33. “Hand could never really grasp it.”

— Robert Aickman

34. “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.”

— Robert Aickman

35. “Margaret noticed that he was one of the many men who classify women into those you talk to and those with whom words merely impede the way.”

— Robert Aickman

36. “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.”

— Robert Aickman

37. “More secrets are improperly disclosed from boredom than from any other motive;.”

— Robert Aickman

38. “But after life has begun to run away from us, nothing is ever again really credible, nor does it matter.”

— Robert Aickman