The Wine-Dark Sea Quotes

“No milk. It is black coffee, pure but strong, that fortifies against the powers of darkness with which the world is filled.”
― Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea

“You speak English beautifully, which means you can't be English.”
― Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea

“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, The Wine-Dark Sea

“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, The Wine-Dark Sea

“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, The Wine-Dark Sea

“It was still the long-drawn-out preliminary to a storm; the tedious, imperfect dispersal of the accumulated energy of the summer.”
― Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea

“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, The Wine-Dark Sea

“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, The Wine-Dark Sea

“Dreams, [...], are misleading, because they make life seem real. When it loses the support of dreams, life dissolves.”
― Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea

“Probably everything in the world is decided by tiny last straws.”
― Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea

“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.”
― Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea

“Tourists were not to be comprehended among those strangers for whom, notoriously, the word is the same as for guests.”
― Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea

“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.”
― Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea

“Those who deem this either weak of me or incredible are invited to find themselves in a like situation.”
― Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea

“I conned the musty stock. At the back of the shop . . . . glimmered the façade of an enormous dolls' house. I wanted it at once.”
― Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea

“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.”
― Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea

“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.”
― Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea