Anna Kavan Quotes

#1. She had come to him when he was no longer there ... because he had not found the young man with the scarred cheek he could not come to her through the glass.

Anna Kavan

#2. My home was in darkness and my companions were shadows beckoning to me from a glass

Anna Kavan

#3. You mustn't be so afraid of life - it's all we've got. Don't let it hurt you so much.

Anna Kavan

#4. Religion is a drug, and to take drugs is degrading,' he said. 'You must learn to look life in the face. Throw away your cowardly drugs, and see the truth, the ugly, cruel, ungodly truth, as it really is.

Anna Kavan

#5. I know I've got a death wish. I've never enjoyed my life, I've never liked people. I love the mountains because they are the negation of life, indestructible, inhuman, untouchable, indifferent, as I want to be.

Anna Kavan

#6. Night is the worst time, when her vitality sinks to its lowest ebb and she's frightened of everything. Unable to read or do anything else, she wanders about the house like a woman living with ghosts, who can't find the way or the will to return to the living world.

Anna Kavan

#7. As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of the world.

Anna Kavan

#8. It was the summer, and Clare Bryant was happy. In the midst of the world which seemed so vast and dangerous to her, so full of change and precariousness, she had found one enduring rock to which her thin arms could cling.

Anna Kavan

#9. She simply vanished, I suppose she's entitled to go if she wants to - she's free, white and twenty-one.

Anna Kavan

#10. She herself did not seem quite real. She was pale and almost transparent, the victim I used for my own enjoyment in dreams.

Anna Kavan

#11. Something in her demanded victimization and terror, so she corrupted my dreams, led me into dark places I had no wish to explore. It was no longer clear to me which of us was the victim. Perhaps we were victims of one another.

Anna Kavan

#12. All I wanted then was for everything to go on as before, so that I could stay deeply asleep, and be no more than a hole in space, not here or anywhere at all, for as long as possible, preferably forever.

Anna Kavan

#13. Everything was so quiet, as if the silence was listening.

Anna Kavan

#14. The note of almost unbearable irritation sounding through the deliberately calm tone in which he has just spoken penetrates her child's heart like a cruel needle of ice. Her face falls grotesquely, her mouth trembles, tears - the sudden, despairing tears of a hurt child - fill her eyes to the brim.

Anna Kavan

#15. Perhaps somewhere in the universe there was a touchstone that she had never found, perhaps there was a clue that would make everything simple and clear
if only she knew where to look ...

Anna Kavan

#16. My ideas were confused. In a peculiar way, the unreality of the outer world appeared to be an extension of my own disturbed state of mind.

Anna Kavan

#17. Like the dandelion clocks, all blown and dispersed on the wind, my life has evaporated into the emptiness of a dream; for which I blame my betrayer, that dubious stranger wearing the mask of a once-loved face.

Anna Kavan

#18. At last I feel identified with the mountains, clean, cold, hard, detached.

Anna Kavan

#19. And in the night my own mother came to the window to meet me, strange, solitary; splendid with countless stars; my mother Night; mine, lovely, mine. My home ...

Anna Kavan

#20. I had a curious feeling that I was living on several planes simultaneously; the overlapping of these planes was confusing.

Anna Kavan

#21. Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me.

Anna Kavan

#22. I relied on what I wrote to build a bridge which could not be cut down. It was my own self in which I trusted, not seeing self as that last cell from which escape can only come too late.

Anna Kavan

#23. Like people who from a bridge watch fish swimming below them, we saw the outside world as an alien element where we could take no part. Isolated behind the glass of our lonely window we looked down on the daily life which was not for us.

Anna Kavan

#24. But the mysterious and private heart never ceases to beat. Indestructible and immortal, the heart beats on, independent, and beating for me alone ...

Anna Kavan

#25. Where do I always find enough courage for one last hope? I am the enemy of this indestructible, pitiless hope which prolongs and intensifies all my pain. I would like to lay hold of hope and strangle it once and for all.

Anna Kavan

#26. I know that I'm doomed and I'm not going to struggle against my fate. I am only writing this down so that when you do not see me any more you will know that my enemy has finally triumphed.

Anna Kavan

#27. She felt herself alone, lost like a stranger in some fantastic country whose language and mode of life were alike incomprehensible, surrounded by enemies in an atmosphere of suspicion and perpetually lurking, unimaginable dangers.

Anna Kavan

#28. It was always the same now, the ghost always coming between her and her life in the world, so much more important, since that lost being was still her only companion, and their now-obsolete relationship the one true human contact she would ever have.

Anna Kavan

#29. Her albino hair illuminated my dreams, shining brighter than moonlight.

Anna Kavan

#30. Why was I led astray by a tiger brightness? Why did a false sun lure me so far from home? ... my eyes had looked at something forbidden and seen what they should never have seen, and now sight itself had gone out of them ... never again would I see the blinding glare of enemy eyes.

Anna Kavan

#31. The cold mornings open their eyes to glare at you one after another, like hostile strangers.

Anna Kavan

#32. I had never before met anyone who owned a telephone and believed in dragons.

Anna Kavan

#33. I had a friend, a lover. Or did I dream it? So many dreams are crowding upon me now that I can scarcely tell true from false: dreams like light imprisoned in bright mineral caves; hot, heavy dreams; ice-age dreams; dreams like machines in the head.

Anna Kavan

#34. What I saw had no solidity, it was all made of mist and nylon, with nothing behind.

Anna Kavan

#35. Yet though there is no visible barrier I know only too well that I am surrounded by unseen and impassable walls which tower into the highest domes of the zenith and sink many miles below the surface of the earth.

Anna Kavan

#36. To wait - only to wait - without even the final merciful deprivation of hope.
Sometimes I think that some secret court must have tried and condemned me, unheard, to this heavy sentence.

Anna Kavan