Katherine Mansfield Quotes

114 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Katherine Mansfield
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
Tidied all my papers. Tore up and ruthlessly destroyed much. This is always a great satisfaction.

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
If there was one thing that he hated more than another it was the way she had of waking him in the morning. She did it on purpose, of course. It was her way of establishing her grievance for the day.

Katherine Mansfield
The ostrich burying its head in the sand does at any rate wish to convey the impression that its head is the most important part of it.

Katherine Mansfield
By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love — the earth and the wonders thereof — the sea — the sun, all that we mean when we speak of the external world. I want to enter into it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious, direct human being. I want, by understanding myself, to understand others.

Katherine Mansfield
She was the same through and through. You could go on cutting slice after slice and you knew you would never light upon a plum or a cherry or even a piece of peel.

Katherine Mansfield
Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order. This is what life has taught me.

Katherine Mansfield
I feel I must live alone, alone, alone — with artists only to touch the door. Every artist cuts off his ear and nails it on the outside of the door for the others to shout into.

Katherine Mansfield
What do you want most to do? That's what I have to keep asking myself, in the face of difficulties.

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
Now's the time when children's noses
All become as red as roses
And the colour of their faces
Makes me think of orchard places
Where the juicy apples grow,
And tomatoes in a row.

Katherine Mansfield
Oh dear — Oh dear — where are my people? With whom have I been happiest? With nobody in particular. It has all been mush of a mushness.

Katherine Mansfield
Fancy cream puffs so soon after breakfast. The very idea made one shudder. All the same, two minutes later Jose and Laura were licking their fingers with that absorbed inward look that only comes from whipped cream.

Katherine Mansfield
A sudden idea on the relationship between 'lovers.' We are neither male nor female. I choose the male who will develop and expand the male in me; he chooses me to expand the female in him. Being made 'whole.'

Katherine Mansfield
It was like living in a house that couldn't be cured of the habit of catching on fire, on a ship that got wrecked every day.

Katherine Mansfield
If you wish to live, you must first attend your own funeral.

Katherine Mansfield
Roses are the only flowers at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing.

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