Cold Hand in Mine Quotes

“There are no beautiful clocks. Everything to do with time is hideous.”
― Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine

“find the right words for your troubles, and your troubles become half-joys.”
― Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine

“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, Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories

“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, Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories

“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, Cold Hand in Mine

“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, Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories

“More secrets are improperly disclosed from boredom than from any other motive;”
― Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine

“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, Cold Hand in Mine

“Life, as we know it, could hardly continue if men did not soon slay the dreamer inside them”
― Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories

“Men’s dreams, their inner truth, are unheimlich also, your Highness. If any man examines his inner truth with both eyes wide open, and his inner eye wide open also, he will be overcome with terror at what he finds. That, I have always supposed, is why we hear these stories about a region of our lake. Out there, on the water, in darkness, out of sight, men encounter the image within them. Or so they suppose. It is not to be expected that many will return unscathed.’ ‘Thus with men, Spalt. What about women?’ ‘Women have no inner life that is so decisively apart. With women the inner life merges ever with the totality.”
― Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine

“When the heart is dead, all is dead, though the victim may not fully realise it for a long time.”
― Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine

“Horrors often come in pairs.”
― Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories

“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 in the company of others.”
― Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories

“Sometimes I really hate being a girl. Even Papa cannot hate my being a girl more than I do sometimes.”
― Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories

“There was a burly chap standing on the low platform, giving the spiel, in a pretty rough delivery. He had tight yellow curls, the colour of cheap lemonade but turning grey, and a big red face, with a splay nose, and very dark red lips. The ears didn’t seem exactly opposite one another.

On the chap’s left a girl lay spread out facing us in an upright canvas chair, as faded and battered as everything else in the outfit. She was dressed up like a French chorus, in a tight and shiny black thing, cut low, and black fishnet stockings, and those shiny black shoes with super high heels that many men go for in such a big way. But the effect was not particularly sexy, all the same. The different bits of costume had all seen better days, like everything else, and the girl herself looked more sick than spicy.”
― Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories

“. . . 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.”
― Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine: Strange Stories

“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.”
― Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine

“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.”
― Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine