Katherine Mansfield Quotes

114 Sourced Quotes

Do you remember your childhood? I am always coming across these marvelous accounts by writers who declare that they remember 'everything.' I certainly don't. The dark stretches, the blanks, are much bigger than the bright glimpses. I seem to have spent most of my time like a plant in a cupboard.

Katherine Mansfield
My love for you tonight is so deep and tender that it seems to be outside myself as well.

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
How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?

Katherine Mansfield
Can one do nothing for the dead? And for a long time the answer had been — Nothing!

Katherine Mansfield
Why do people always put on such airs when they are saying Goodbye? They seem exquisitely glad to be staying. Are they? Or is it envy?

Katherine Mansfield
Whatever happens I have had these blissful, perfect moments and they are worth living for.

Katherine Mansfield
What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss - absolute bliss - as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle into every finger and toe?...

Katherine Mansfield
Perhaps it does not matter so very much what it is one loves in this world. But love something one must.

Katherine Mansfield
I adore Life. What do all the fools matter and all the stupidity. They do matter but somehow for me they cannot touch the body of Life. Life is marvellous. I want to be deeply rooted in it - to live - to expand - to breathe in it - to rejoice - to share it. To give and to be asked for Love.

Katherine Mansfield
What is it with me? Am I absolutely nobody, but merely inordinately vain? I do not know…. But I am most fearfully unhappy. That is all. I am so unhappy that I wish I was dead—yet I should be mad to die when I have not yet lived at all.

Katherine Mansfield
All the wild sweetness of the flower
Tangled against the wall.
It was that magic, silent hour....
The branches grew so tall
They twined themselves into a bower.
The sun shown... and the fall

Of yellow blossom on the grass!
You feel that golden rain?
Both of you could not hold, alas,
(both of you tried, in vain)
A memory, stranger. So I pass....
It will not come again.

Katherine Mansfield
But the more poetry one reads the more one longs to read!

Katherine Mansfield
Yes, my mother's death is a terrible sorrow to me. I feel — do you know what I mean — the silence of it so. She was more alive than anyone I have ever known.

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

Katherine Mansfield
There is no question of getting beyond it.... The little boat enters the dark fearful gulf and our only cry is to escape — 'put me on land again.'

Katherine Mansfield
In the woods where snow is thick, bars of sunlight lay like pale fire.

Katherine Mansfield
Letters are the real curse of my existence. I hate to write them: I have to. If I don't, there they are — the great guilty gates barring my way.

Katherine Mansfield
I am going to enjoy life in Paris I know. It is so human and there is something noble in the city... It is a real city, old and fine and life plays in it for everybody to see.

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
Winter is a terrible time for thin people — terrible! Why should it hound them down, fasten on them, worry them so? Why not, for a change, take a nip, take a snap at the fat ones who wouldn't notice? But no! It is sleek, warm, cat-like summer that makes the fat one's life a misery. Winter is all for bones...

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

Katherine Mansfield
In fact, isn't it a joy — there is hardly a greater one — to find a new book, a living book, and to know that it will remain with you while life lasts?

Katherine Mansfield
To work — to work! It is such infinite delight to know that we still have the best things to do.

Katherine Mansfield
How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you — you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences — little rags and shreds of your very life.

Katherine Mansfield
The icicles at dawn this morning were the color of opals — blue lit with fire.

Katherine Mansfield
But then, there comes that moment rare
When, for no cause that I can find,
The little voices of the air
Sound above all the sea and wind.

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
C. came in yesterday to see me, carrying a baby Pekinese. Have you ever seen a really baby one about the size of a fur glove, covered with pale gold down, with paws like minute seal flappers, very large impudent eyes and ears like fried potatoes? Good God! What creatures they are.... They are like fairy animals.

Katherine Mansfield
The truth is that every true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone - reading between the lines - has bcome the secret friend of their author.

Katherine Mansfield