Anna Kavan Quotes

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.

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.

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

Everything was quiet, as if the silence was listening.

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.

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 never before met anyone who owned a telephone and believed in dragons.

Because of my fear that the daytime world would become real, I had to establish reality in another place.

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

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

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