Quotes from Robert Aickman

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Hand could never really grasp it.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Those who deem this either weak of me or incredible are invited to find themselves in a like situation.

It's the most depressing-looking plaything I ever saw.' 'I want to pretend I live in it,' I said, 'and give masked balls.' My social history was eager but indiscriminate.

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.

Probably everything in the world is decided by tiny last straws.

He supposed that the dream was fragile. If thought about to practically, if analyzed to closely, it might well cease to recur. The dream was probably best left in the back of the mind, at the edges of the mind; within that mental area which comes into its own between waking and sleeping- and, less happily, between sleeping and waking.

Margaret thought it was an exaggeration, but it was still odd that women were required to array themselves primarily as erotic objects, even on the most unsuitable occasions, even when they had passed forty, even when the last thing that men like Henry seemed to think of was eroticism, anyway where his wife was concerned.

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.