Best 18 quotes of Robert Aickman on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.