Katherine Mansfield Quotes

114 Sourced Quotes

Courage is like a disobedient dog, once it starts running away it flies all the faster for your attempts to recall it.

Katherine Mansfield
I am a recluse at present & do nothing but write & read & read & write

Katherine Mansfield
And wind moving through grass so that the grass quivers. This moves me with an emotion I don't ever understand.

Katherine Mansfield
Were we positive, eager, real — alive? No, we were not. We were a nothingness shot with gleams of what might be.

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
When we can begin to take our failures nonseriously, it means we are ceasing to be afraid of them. It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves.

Katherine Mansfield
Now who is to decide between 'Let it be' and 'Force it'?

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

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
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
I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing (Though I may write about cabmen. That's no matter.) But warm, eager, living life — to be rooted in life — to learn, to desire, to feel, to think, to act. This is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for.

Katherine Mansfield
Fairylike, the fire rose in two branched flames like the golden antlers of some enchanted stag.

Katherine Mansfield
Every time one leaves anywhere, something precious, which ought not to be killed, is left to die.

Katherine Mansfield
You are a Queen. Let mine be the joy of giving you your kingdom.

Katherine Mansfield
I am poor - obscure - just eighteen years of age - with a rapacious appetite for everything and principles as light as my purse.

Katherine Mansfield
The late evening is the time of times. Then with that unearthly beauty before one it is not hard to realise how far one has to go. To write something that will be worthy of that rising moon, that pale light.

Katherine Mansfield
I really only have Perfect Fun with myself. Other people won't stop and look at the things I want to look at or, if they do, they stop to please me or to humor me or to keep the peace.

Katherine Mansfield
As in the physical world, so in the spiritual world, pain does not last forever.

Katherine Mansfield
Oh, how quickly things changed! Why didn't happiness last for ever? For ever wasn't a bit too long.

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
But one day we shall be rich, and the next poor. One day we shall dine in a palace and the next we'll sit in a forest and toast mushrooms on a hatpin....

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 astonishing how violently a big branch shakes when a silly little bird has left it. I expect the bird knows it and feels immensely arrogant.

Katherine Mansfield