Machines in the Head Quotes

“They are honourable and precious to me, these books, in proportion to their great heroism. They are like members of a suicide squad who do not hesitate to engage the enormously superior enemy, life, upon my behalf.”
― Anna Kavan, Machines in the Head: The Selected Short Writing of Anna Kavan

“Black grasses bristling out of whiteness. Festoons of dirtyish ice hung from rocks like soiled cotton wool. A smug antiseptic-looking gargantuan face, every girl’s magazine cover college boyfriend, magnified to the nth degree and thanking God he’s American. I began to feel cold and lonely”
― Anna Kavan, Machines in the Head: The Selected Short Writing of Anna Kavan

“I had a friend, a lover. It was a dream.”
― Anna Kavan, Machines in the Head: The Selected Short Writing of Anna Kavan

“Some thing, 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.”
― Anna Kavan, Machines in the Head: The Selected Short Writing of Anna Kavan

“Silence is a friend that never betrays anyone.”
― Anna Kavan, Machines in the Head: The Selected Short Writing of Anna Kavan

“When I go to bed at night it is so cold that the pillow freezes my cheek.”
― Anna Kavan, Machines in the Head: The Selected Short Writing of Anna Kavan

“The thing which does surprise me is my own optimism. Surely I ought to recognize now that my number is up. Where do I always find enough courage for one more last hope? I am the enemy of this indestructible, pitiless hope which prolongs and intensifies all my pain. I would like to lay hold of hope and strangle it once and for all.”
― Anna Kavan, Machines in the Head: The Selected Short Writing of Anna Kavan

“I was about to become the world’s best-kept secret; one that would never be told. What a thrilling enigma for posterity I should be!”
― Anna Kavan, Machines in the Head: The Selected Short Writing of Anna Kavan