Quotes from Anna Kavan

What can I do now? What am I to become? How can I live in this world I'm condemned to but can't endure? They couldn't stand it either, so they made a world of their own. Well, they have each other's company, and they are heroes, whereas I'm quite alone, and have none of the qualities essential to heroism - the spirit, the toughness, the dedication. I'm back where I was as a child, solitary, helpless, unwanted, frightened.

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.

Inexorable self, carried like the superfluous and tiresome piece of luggage which it is impossible to lose; franked with the customs' stamp of every frontier, retrieved exasperatingly from the disaster where everything else is lost, companion of the dislocation of cancelled sailings and missed connections, witness of every catastrophe, survivor of all voyages and situations…I

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.

Now I understood why I had to prevent the day world from getting real. I saw that my instinct about this was a true one. As my eyes grew more discerning, I recognized my enemy's face and I was afraid, seeing there was a danger that one day might destroy me. Because of my fear that the daytime world would become real, I had to establish reality in another place.

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

There are certain shocks which, if sufficiently strong, seem to have power to destroy the balance of life. Such a shock would seem to overthrow all the intricate, vital, slowly developed mechanism of mind, to plunge the victim into a chaotic half-world of confusion and loss. This is what had happened to Anna.

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.

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

The sight of the wall of water outside reassured me, giving me the idea that it made very little difference whether I stayed with her, or set out alone on my journey that had neither visible starting point nor destination. It didn't matter: since, however closely I became involved with another existence, my own world would always remain secret, inaccessible and shut-off; nobody would ever see me, except as a dim, changeable, wavering shadow, through its impenetrable, semi-opaque walls.

Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me. At times this could be disturbing.

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

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.

It has something to do with the cosmic rays coming from outer space. They strike some person or thing, and then you get a mutation - like the stripes on a zebra. The attraction of two such mutants to one another would have an almost incestuous appeal and be far stronger than the bond of love between ordinary human beings.

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.

How intimately I experience in my heart just what he must have felt in all of those unknown rooms, some of them poor, perhaps, and some splendid, but all opposing him with the cold fearful indifference of other people's belongings, against which he has to defend himself as best he can with his poor lonely trunk and his case of books.

So this was how he lived now, getting jittery because a bus pulled up near. Well, he was not going on like that. It was not good enough. The one person who could help him had not appeared. He probably never would. But there must be some other way. He knew that there was another way although for the moment he couldn't think what it was. Soon it would come back to him, in a minute he would remember the way out, the way where he was going.

Standing there, I had the feeling of putting on armour, taking up secret weapons, becoming like a dreamer, invulnerable for the moment—safe in my dream. Now I could face the world, having no part in life; the presence of waiting phantoms could be forgotten. I was outside everything, surrendered unconditionally to my dream, giving no thought to my next move, prepared to obey whatever impulse next reaches me from the unseen.

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.

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.

Imprisoned within the impassable walls of the locked, lifeless polar world, all that is left for her is a deathly cold isolation, numbing her senses and freezing her brain. The world lost, the light lost, the mind lost, the coldly gleaming, relentlessly moving ice has become her sole and final reality.

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.

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.

Below, the fjord was an impossible icy volcano erupting the baleful fire of the swallowed sun.