Quotes from Anna Kavan

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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…

The day was ill-omened from the beginning; one of those unlucky days when every little detail seems to go wrong and one finds oneself engaged in a perpetual and infuriating strife with inanimate objects. How truly fiendish the sub-human world can be on these occasions! How every atom, every cell, every molecule, seems to be leagued in a maddening conspiracy against the unfortunate being who has incurred its obscure displeasure!

She looked, and saw the black, domed sky arching over her head. And her heart dilated; she felt the great black dome in her heart. She sat under the stars, worshipping them. Her heart opened and grew vast, until the whole sky with all its stars began to pour into her, a mysterious flood of star-strung darkness. She wanted to receive the night sky into her heart.

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.

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.

The last time she had seen him in the flesh, all the vital force of his life stripped away, his sharpened face had confronted her with such a fearful fixed finality of sightless indifference that she had been frozen in mortal terror, engulfed by abysmal despair. After all the years of unfailing support, his huge, inhuman, deaf, blind inaccessibility was horrifying. He had not kept his promise. He had abandoned her, left her to suffer alone.

But to whom can one appeal when one does not even know where to find the judge? How can one ever hope to prove one's innocence when there is no means of knowing of what one has been accused? No, there's no justice for people like us in the world: all that we can do is to suffer as bravely as possible and put our oppressors to shame.

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.

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.

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.

Instead of my world, there would soon be only ice, snow, stillness, death; no more violence, no war, no victims; nothing but frozen silence, absence of life. The ultimate achievement of mankind would be, not just self-destruction, but the destruction of all life; the transformation of the living world into a dead planet.

There is, I believe, a kind of telepathy between the condemned: a sort of intuitive recognition which can even make itself felt through the medium of the printed page. How else should I feel—without fear of appearing presumptuous, either—for this great man whom I never saw and to whom I could not have spoken, the tender, wincing, pathetic solicitude that painfully comes into being only between fellow-sufferers?

Her life was shameful and lonely. There was no longer any hope for her, there was no chance of escape. Yet, in spite of her humiliation and the despair which possessed her, she still remained in some part of her soul aloof and untouched. It was the hard centre of her being which never altered. Nothing could touch that.

Sometimes a savage beauty lured me into the sun and I would start to love the danger a little. On these occasions I felt the reluctant love drained painfully from me as blood drains from a deep wound. The tigers lapped my love's blood and remained enemies. The inhabitants of the day laughed at the gift I wanted to bring them, and I shut myself in my inner room to escape the betrayal of their arrogant mouths.

The past had vanished and become nothing; the future was the inconceivable nothingness of annihilation. All that was left was the ceaselessly shrinking fragment of time called 'now'.