Julia and the Bazooka and Other Stories 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.”
― Anna Kavan, Julia and the Bazooka and Other Stories

“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.”
― Anna Kavan, Julia and the Bazooka and Other Stories

“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.”
― Anna Kavan, Julia and the Bazooka and Other Stories

“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.”
― Anna Kavan, Julia and the Bazooka and Other Stories

“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.”
― Anna Kavan, Julia and the Bazooka and Other Stories

“Their eyes met for a moment. And the glance that flickered between them had been a wordless message of understanding, the affirmation of a sympathetic secret alliance from which everyone else was excluded by natural law - the close mysterious blood-bond between two mutants, of which she had not yet heard. But, in some indescribable fashion, it had seemed, even then, that, obscurely, everything was already known and had been accepted, accepted finally and absolutely, in the depths of her unconscious self.”
― Anna Kavan, Julia and the Bazooka and Other Stories

“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.”
― Anna Kavan, Julia and the Bazooka and Other Stories

“At last I feel identified with the mountains, clean, cold, hard, detached.”
― Anna Kavan, Julia and the Bazooka and Other Stories

“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.”
― Anna Kavan, Julia and the Bazooka and Other Stories

“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.”
― Anna Kavan, Julia and the Bazooka and Other Stories