Anna Kavan

dividing allegiance between them. Both principals held stocks of nuclear weapons many times in excess of the overkill stage, so that the balance of terror appeared to be nicely adjusted

But some of the lesser countries also possessed thermonuclear devices, although which of them was not known: and this uncertainty, and the resulting tension, provoked escalating crises, each of which brought nearer the final catastrophe.

driving mankind to a second suicide, even before the full effect of the first had been felt.

I looked at the natural world, and it seemed to share my feelings, to be trying in vain to escape its approaching doom. The

He and others like him had seen the end of our planet, the end of the human race. The race was dying, the collective death-wish, the fatal impulse to self-destruction, although perhaps human life might survive

The life here was over. But life was continuing and expanding in a different place

From the doomed dying world man had ruined, I seemed to catch sight of this other one, new, infinitely alive, and of boundless potential

It did not seem to matter what I did now. I was committed to violence and must keep to my pattern.

The ice world spreading over our world. Mountainous walls of ice surrounding the girl. Her moon-white skin, her hair sparkling with diamond prisms under the moon. The moon’s dead eye watching the death of our world

The public used to be admitted on certain days. But we had to suspend the practice on account of vandalism. Hooligans did the damage the armies refrained from doing. There are people you can’t teach to appreciate beauty. They’re subhuman