Quotes from Anna Kavan

They've all been against me, ever since I can remember, even when I was six years old. What sort of human beings are these, who can be inhuman to a child of six? How can I help hating them all? Sometimes they disgust me so much that I feel I can't go on living among them - that I must escape from the loathsome creatures swarming like maggots all over the earth.

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.

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

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.

He saw the young man's face in the mirror up on the wall, he saw the thick wind-ruffled hair and the little scar on the cheekbone. The face moved in the mirror and when he looked round he could not see it anywhere in the room, and when he wanted to call out the sickness choked him, and now he tried to fight the icy sickness, but like whales the waves of it fell on him till he was pounded and drowned, and while he froze suffocating and could not move or breathe...

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

Hell had at least been familiar; she knew that, if she'd been capable of feeling anything, she would have felt afraid of this irresistible force that had picked her up like a scrap of paper and was sweeping her into the void, right out of the world as she knew it, as if whirling her off the earth altogether.

It was as though I had parted company all at once with my usual reasoning self, which had withdrawn into the shadows, leaving me no means of communicating with it; while another "I" took command, functioning at a different, more mysterious level, where all outer appearances were deceptive, and even the thoughts in my head shot with ambiguity.

She was over-sensitive, highly strung, afraid of people and life; her personality had been damaged by a sadistic mother who kept her in a permanent state of frightened subjection.

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

The men's tanned faces, the faces of the women, bright with cosmetics, all suddenly appeared similar, as though wearing identical masks; hard, smiling, decorative, devoid of feeling. Not one of the seemed capable of expressing affection or pity or any of the softer emotions. They frightened her, these gay, hard, animated, worldly masks; she would always be a stranger among them, lost, ill-at-ease, out of place.

And suddenly the idea comes into your head that perhaps now, at this very moment while you are passing by, in one of the rooms behind those drab shutters, at a worm-eaten desk, among bundles of papers tied up with red or green tape, with scratchy old-fashioned penstrokes, your fate is being inscribed

A lightning flash is stabbed into the sky and jabbed at by other flashes, their crazy neons jittering into word shapes, WHAT IS LOST NOW IS OUR HOME IN THIS WORLD.

For the first time in her life she could talk openly of the things which interested her and were important to her. She had a great need of speech, of putting her thoughts into words; otherwise her thoughts seemed to escape her, flying about her brain in a wild confusion. It needed the power of words to put them in their places. And Rachel was full of understanding, using her sensitiveness to fan the thoughts of Anna towards coherency.

But he had held her hand, he had looked into her face in the dark hall, and a strange ecstatic entrancement had come over her, as though she would like to stand there forever, just feeling her hand in his. The extraordinary comfort that filled her heart because of that contact with another human being! She knew that she must feel it again, that, like a drug-taker, she would never be satisfied until she had repeated that unique and trance-like sensation.

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.

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....

The years passed like the steps of a staircase leading lower and lower. I did not walk any more in the sun or hear the songs of larks like crystal fountains playing against the sky. No hand enfolded mine in the warm clasp of love. My thoughts were again solitary, disintegrate, disharmonious – the music gone. I lived alone in a few pleasant rooms, feeling my life run out aimlessly with the tedious hours: the life of an old maid ran out of my fingertips.

The whole room is as black as pitch. In fact, I'm not at all sure that it is a room. Something suggests to me now that I'm on board ship; I might be floating adrift on some tranquil sea. And yet there's no sound, no motion, nothing to indicate either sea or land. Like a ghost train my life streams through my head, and I don't know which point of the compass I'm facing. How dark it is. The moon must have stolen away secretly.

Since he'd gone, the world had become unnervingly strange. There was nothing she could do and nowhere she could go. She felt lost, lonely, dazed, deprived of everything, even of her identity, which was not strong enough to survive without his constant encouragement and reassurance.

It seemed to me we were fighting against the ice, which was all the while coming steadily nearer, covering more of the world with its dead silence, its awful white peace. By making war we asserted the fact that we were alive and opposed the icy death creeping over the globe.

It's lonely? Sure, it's lonely. That's what you asked for, didn't you? After all, if you hadn't been too superior for the gang, you wouldn't be here. And think how much more distinguished it is to be on your own, or with one or two individualists like yourself, than to be an ordinary gregarious animal going about with the herd.

Perhaps I am the victim of some mysterious political, religious or financial machination—some vast and shadowy plot, whose ramifications are so obscure as to appear to the uninitiated to be quite outside reason, requiring, for instance, something as apparently senseless as the destruction of everybody with red hair or with a mole on his left leg.

In this nameless place nothing appears animate, nothing is close, nothing is real; I am pursued by the remembered scent of dust sprinkled with summer rain.