Sleep Has His House Quotes

“My home was in darkness and my companions were shadows beckoning to me from a glass”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“And in the night my own mother came to the window to meet me, strange, solitary; splendid with countless stars; my mother Night; mine, lovely, mine. My home…”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“Why was I led astray by a tiger brightness? Why did a false sun lure me so far from home?...my eyes had looked at something forbidden and seen what they should never have seen, and now sight itself had gone out of them…never again would I see the blinding glare of enemy eyes.”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“By what judgment am I judged? What is the accusation against me? Am I to be accused of my own betrayal? Am I to blame because you are my enemies? Yours is the responsibility, the knowledge, the power. I trusted you, you played with me as a cat plays with a mouse, and now you accuse me. I had no weapon against you, not realizing that there was need for weapons until too late. This is your place; you are at home here. I came as a stranger, alone, without a gun in my hand, bringing only a present that I wanted to give you. Am I to blame because the gift was unwelcome? Am I accused of the untranslated indictment against myself? Is it my fault that a charge has been laid against me in a different language? Is my offense that I stood too long on your threshold, holding a present that was unsuitable? Am I accused because you, wanting a victim and not a friend, threw away the only thing which I had to give?”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“Are you afraid of the tigers? Do you hear them padding all round you on their fierce fine velvet feet? The speed of growth of tigers in the nightland is a thing which ought to be investigated some time by the competent authority. You start off with one, about the size of a mouse, and before you know where you are he’s twice the size of the Sumatra tiger which defeats all comers in that hemisphere. And then, before you can say Knife (not a very tactful thing to say in the circumstances anyhow), all his boy and girl friends are gathered round, your respectable quiet decorous docile night turns itself into a regular tiger-garden.”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“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.”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“neon sign in red letters EXIT TO HELL…A walks under the arch….she seems not to notice where she is going….Just as the angels are preparing to carry the arch away B makes a desperate dash at it and dives through. Everything blacks out… What happens when you start the downward trip?...Of course there isn’t a hope of ever getting out again into the light. Once you’re on your way down, the machinery takes charge of you, you’re caught, trapped, finished for good and all…you might just as well give in and pluck the cruel thorn of hope out of your heart.”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“Like people who from a bridge watch fish swimming below them, we saw the outside world as an alien element where we could take no part. Isolated behind the glass of our lonely window we looked down on the daily life which was not for us.”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“Now I understood why I had to prevent the day world from getting real. I saw that my instinct about this was a true one. As my eyes grew more discerning, I recognized my enemy’s face and I was afraid, seeing there was a danger that one day might destroy me. Because of my fear that the daytime world would become real, I had to establish reality in another place.”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“Inexorable self, carried like the superfluous and tiresome piece of luggage which it is impossible to lose; franked with the customs’ stamp of every frontier, retrieved exasperatingly from the disaster where everything else is lost, companion of the dislocation of cancelled sailings and missed connections, witness of every catastrophe, survivor of all voyages and situations…I”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“I relied on what I wrote to build a bridge which could not be cut down. It was my own self in which I trusted, not seeing self as that last cell from which escape can only come too late.”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“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 with the positive day. At night, under the influence of cosmic radiations quite different from those of the day, human affairs are apt to come to a crisis. At night most human beings die and are born.
Sleep Has His House describes in the night-time language certain stages in the development of one individual human being. No interpretation is needed of this language we have all spoken in childhood and in our dreams; but for the sake of unity a few words before every section indicate the corresponding events of the day.”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“A lightning flash is stabbed into the sky and jabbed at by other flashes, their crazy neons jittering into word shapes, WHAT IS LOST NOW IS OUR HOME IN THIS WORLD.”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“And suddenly the idea comes into your head that perhaps now, at this very moment while you are passing by, in one of the rooms behind those drab shutters, at a worm-eaten desk, among bundles of papers tied up with red or green tape, with scratchy old-fashioned penstrokes, your fate is being inscribed”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“You don’t like it here? Why didn’t you keep out, then, for God’s sake, while you had the chance? Anyhow, it’s no good moaning and snivelling now. Put a good face on it. Be tough. Show the crowd you can take it. You’re an individualist, aren’t you? To hell with the crowd. What do you care about them? You’re here because you’ve got no time for the crowd. What do you care about them and their damnfool heaven? To hell with heaven, anyway.”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“It is not easy to describe my mother. Remote and starry, her sad stranger’s grace did not concern the landscape of the day. Should I say that she was beautiful or that she did not love me? Have shadows beauty? Does the night love her child?”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“When everything's said and done, unfortunately, we find ourselves in the position of children whose parents have gone to the theatre, leaving them alone in the dark house. Yes, we are forced, if we are honest, to make the saddest of all admissions when it comes to the last resort: Alas, we do not understand these things.”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“It’s lonely? Sure, it’s lonely. That’s what you asked for, didn’t you? After all, if you hadn’t been too superior for the gang, you wouldn’t be here. And think how much more distinguished it is to be on your own, or with one or two individualists like yourself, than to be an ordinary gregarious animal going about with the herd.”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“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.”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“...transparent as the shadows of icicles, incorporated in the night-plasma.”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House

“Several moon-faced children are moving about here and there, and they are made a great fuss of, caressed and petted by everybody. The whole party is continuously in a state of fluidity, groups forming and breaking and re-forming with different units, so that the effect is that of a dazzling and constantly changing colour design, like those boxes of coloured beads which can be shaken into innumerable shining patterns. Two figures only remain static, the hub around which all this brilliance revolves.”
― Anna Kavan, Sleep Has His House