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Anna Kavan

Anna Kavan Biography

Novelist

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“All at once I feel desperate, outraged. Why am I alone doomed to spend nights of torment, with an unseen jailer, when all the rest of the world sleeps peacefully? By what laws have I been tried and condemned, without my knowledge, and to such a heavy sentence, too, when I do not even know of what or by whom I have been indicted? A wild impulse comes to me to protest, to demand a hearing, to refuse to submit any longer to such injustice. 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.”

SufferingInjusticeAloneDesperateDoomedTormentCondemned
Book:Asylum Piece
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“A human being can only endure depression up to a certain point; when this point of saturation is reached it becomes necessary for him to discover some element of pleasure, no matter how humble or on how low a level, in his environment if he is to go on living at all. In my case these insignificant birds with their subdued colourings have provided just sufficient distraction to keep me from total despair. Each day I find myself spending longer and longer at the window watching their flights, their quarrels, their mouse-quick flutterings, their miniature feuds and alliances. Curiously enough, it is only when I am standing in front of the window that I feel any sense of security. While I am watching the birds I believe that I am comparatively immune from the assaults of life. The very indifference to humanity of these wild creatures affords me a certain safeguard. Where all else is dangerous, hostile and liable to inflict pain, they alone can do me no injury because, probably, they are not even aware of my existence. The birds are at once my refuge and my relaxation.”

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Book:Asylum Piece
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“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!”

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Book:Asylum Piece
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“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.”

TimeLonelinessAloneSolitaryTediousAimlessDisintegrateDisharmonious
Book:Asylum Piece
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“In a polished surface of metal I happen to notice my reflected face; it wears a pale, beaten lonely look, eyes looking out at nothing with an expression of fear, frightened and lonely in a nightmare world. Something, I don’t know what, makes me think of my childhood; I remember myself as a schoolchild sitting at a hard wooden desk, and then as a little girl with thick, fair, wind-tossed hair, feeding the swans in a park. And it seems both strange and sad to me that all those childish years were spent in preparation for this – that, forgotten by everybody, with a beaten face, I should serve machinery in a place far away from the sun.”

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Book:Asylum Piece
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“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.”

LossAbandonment
Book:Julia and the Bazooka and Other Stories
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“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.”

SolitudeDetachmentInner LifeJourneysImpenetrability
Book:Eagles' Nest
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“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.”

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Book:Eagles' Nest
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“The general effect produced by all this is sinister and at the same time slightly phony. What really introduces the sinister element is that the dramatic trappings are somehow unconvincing. The massive walls might quite possibly be made of paper, the whole place might taper off into a flimsy tangle of wires and screens just out of eyeshot. And yet nothing positively suggests this. It’s simply the ominous dream-feeling that appearances may suddenly slip out of themselves into something entirely different.”

Surreal Quotes
Book:Sleep Has His House
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“It comforted her, in the confused unhappy welter of her emotions, to see the mountains always tranquil, remote, in their lonely splendour; untouchable, serenely inviolate. It was an obscure comfort to her to know that man's hectic world wasn't the only one — that there were others, where agitation and passion and bewilderment had no place. When her love turned into a chaotic fever-dream, in which she was tossing, hallucinated, frightened and miserable, she had longed to escape to the cold, austere, changeless beauty and peace of the snow.”

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Author:Anna Kavan
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“I had grown used to the feeling that I was going towards execution. It was something in the distance, an idea with which I had become familiar. Now it suddenly sprang at me, stood close at my elbow, no longer an idea, but a reality, just about to happen. It gave me a shock, a physical sensation in the pit of the stomach. 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'.”

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Author:Anna Kavan
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“The man has a curious inborn conviction of his own superiority which is quite unshakeable. All his life he has bullied and browbeaten those around him by his high-and-mightiness and his atrocious temper. As a boy he terrorized his entire family by his tantrums, when, if thwarted, he would throw himself on the floor and yell till he went blue in the face. It has been much the same ever since. Everyone's terrified of his rages. He has only to start grinding his teeth, and people fall flat before him.”

PeopleIfsMenHas BeensFacesFallBoysHe ManBlueConvictionRageTeethCuriousFlatsTemperTerrifiedSuperiorityBulliedTantrums
Author:Anna Kavan
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“A terrible cold world of ice and death had replaced the living world we had always known. Outside there was only the deadly cold, the frozen vacuum of an ice age, life reduced to mineral crystals. [. . .] I drove at great speed, as if escaping, pretending we could escape. Although I knew there was no escape from the ice, from the ever-diminishing remnant of time that encapsuled us.”

IfsWorldAgeKnownColdTerribleSpeedIcePretendingReplacedApocalypseFrozenCrystalsVacuumsEscapingMineralsRemnantsIce AgeCold WorldAge Life
Author:Anna Kavan
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“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.”

WorldWellsChildrenMadeSpiritQualityCompanyThis WorldHeroEssentialsEndureFrightenedDedicationHeroismSolitaryHelplessToughnessUnwantedI'm Back
Author:Anna Kavan
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“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.”

LoveLittlesSometimesAgeWantedFeltRoomsEnemySunBloodDangerMouthsBetrayalWoundsOccasionsLaughedArrogantSavagesTigersDrainsReluctantDrainedDeep Wounds
Author:Anna Kavan
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“While I am watching the birds I believe I am comparatively immune from the assaults of life. The very indifference to humanity of these wild creatures affords me a certain safeguard. Where all else is dangerous, hostile and liable to inflict pain, they alone can do me no injury because, probably, they are not even aware of my existence. The birds are at once my refuge and my relaxation.”

BelievePainCertainHumanityI BelieveCan DoExistenceDangerousCreaturesBirdIndifferenceInjuryRefugeAssaultHostileRelaxationImmuneLiableWild Creatures
Author:Anna Kavan
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