Katherine Mansfield Quotes

114 Sourced Quotes

Would you not like to try all sorts of lives — one is so very small — but that is the satisfaction of writing — one can impersonate so many people.

Katherine Mansfield
If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools. With mushrooms it is so simple — you salt them well, put them aside and have patience. But with love, you have no sooner lighted on anything that bears even the remotest resemblance to it than you are perfectly certain it is not only a genuine specimen, but perhaps the only genuine mushroom ungathered.

Katherine Mansfield
I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.

Katherine Mansfield
The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

Katherine Mansfield
I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.... This all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, it's no longer so. I feel happy—deep down.

Katherine Mansfield
Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.

Katherine Mansfield
It's a terrible thing to be alone — yes it is — it is — but don't lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath — as terrible as you like — but a mask.

Katherine Mansfield
I don't believe other people are ever as foolishly excited as I am while I'm working. How could they be? Writers would have to live in trees.

Katherine Mansfield
We cling to our last pleasures as the tree clings to its last leaves.

Katherine Mansfield
For the last two weeks I have written scarcely anything. I have been idle. I have failed.

Katherine Mansfield
Ah, what happiness it is to be with people who are all happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes.

Katherine Mansfield
The leaves move in the garden, the sky is pale, and I catch myself weeping. It is hard — it is hard to make a good death.

Katherine Mansfield
Why! Why! Why is the middle-class so stodgy — so utterly without a sense of humor?

Katherine Mansfield
I have just partaken of that saddest of things — a cup of weak tea.

Katherine Mansfield
Why it should be such an effort to write to the people one loves I can't imagine. It's none at all to write to those who don't really count.

Katherine Mansfield
Conversation is like a dear little baby that is brought in to be handed around. You must rock it, nurse it, keep it on the move if you want to keep smiling.

Katherine Mansfield
It was one of those days so clear, so still, so silent, you almost feel the earth itself has stopped in astonishment at its own beauty.

Katherine Mansfield
You might drop your heart into me and you'd never hear it touch bottom.

Katherine Mansfield
I have such a horror of telegrams that ask me how I am!! I always want to reply dead.

Katherine Mansfield
What happiness it is to listen to rain at night; joyful relief, ease; a lapping-round and hushing and brooding tenderness, all are mingled together in the sound of the fast-falling rain. God, looking down upon the rainy earth, sees how faint are these lights shining in little windows, — how easily put out.

Katherine Mansfield
When we begin to take our failures non-seriously, it means we are ceasing to be afraid of them. It is immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves.

Katherine Mansfield
It is strange that there are times when I feel the stars are not at all solemn: they are secretly gay.

Katherine Mansfield
I have made it a rule of my life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy, and no one who intends to become a writer can afford to indulge in it. You can't get it into shape; you can't build on it; it's only good for wallowing in.

Katherine Mansfield
I'd always rather be with people who loved me too little rather than with people who loved me too much.

Katherine Mansfield
That's all life is — something childish and very natural. Isn't it?

Katherine Mansfield
Warm, eager, living life — to be rooted in life — to learn, to desire to know, to feel, to think, to act. That is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for. … This all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, it's no longer so. I feel happy — deep down. All is well.

Katherine Mansfield
Bless you, my darling, and remember you are always in the heart - oh tucked so close there is no chance of escape - of your sister.

Katherine Mansfield
If one really does try to find out why it is that people don't leave each other, one discovers a mystery. It is because they can't; they are bound. And nobody on earth knows what are the bonds that bind them except those two.

Katherine Mansfield
To acknowledge the presence of fear is to give birth to failure.

Katherine Mansfield
Josephine had had a moment of absolute terror at the cemetery, while the coffin was lowered, to think that she and Constantia had done this thing without asking his permission. What would father say when he found out? For he was bound to find out sooner or later. He always did. 'Buried. You two girls had me buried!'

Katherine Mansfield