About Anna Kavan: Anna Kavan was a British novelist, short story writer and painter. Originally publishing under her first married name, Helen Ferguson, she adopted the name Anna Kavan in 1939, not only as a nom de plume but as her legal identity.
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.
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...
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 ...
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.
Her albino hair illuminated my dreams, shining brighter than moonlight.
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 had a curious feeling that I was living on several planes simultaneously; the overlapping of these planes was confusing.
She herself did not seem quite real. She was pale and almost transparent, the victim I used for my own enjoyment in dreams.
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.
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 abys...
Foreword: Life is tension or the result of tension: without tension the creative impulse cannot exist. If human life be taken as the result of tension between the two polarities night and day, night, the negative pole, must share equal importance wit...
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-wor...
