Quotes from Robert Aickman

Tourists were not to be comprehended among those strangers for whom, notoriously, the word is the same as for guests.

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

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

Colonel Adamski,' said Margaret. 'I have to ask you whether you take milk?' 'No milk. It is black coffee, pure but strong, that fortifies against the powers of darkness with which the world is filled.

One had to dispel practicality. Then something else could be heard – if one was lucky, if the sun was shining, if the paths were well made, if one wore the right garments: and if one made no attempt at definition or popularisation.

I began to perceive how relative and instrumental truth could be.

One point is that strangeness usually takes an unexpected form, it is no good looking for something strange. It only happens when you're not looking.

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.

Thus reinforced, they spent the noonday hours spinning dreams like cobwebs, and dodging demands like nets.

I conned the musty stock. At the back of the shop . . . . glimmered the façade of an enormous dolls' house. I wanted it at once.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Confidences pre-announced are seldom worth while.

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.

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