Katherine Mansfield - People Quotes

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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
It's an infernal nuisance to love Life as I do. I seem to love it more as time goes on rather than less. It never becomes a habit to me. It's always a marvel. I do hope I'll be able to keep in it long enough to do some really good work. I'm sick of people dying who promise well.

Katherine Mansfield
In the shortest sea voyage there is no sense of time. You have been down in the cabin for hours or days or years. Nobody knows or cares. You know all the people to the point of indifference. You do not believe in dry land any more — you are caught in the pendulum itself, and left there, idly swinging.

Katherine Mansfield
The world to me is a dream and the people in it are sleepers. I have known a few instances of intensity but that is all. I want to find a world in which these instances are united. Shall I succeed? I scarcely care. What is important is to try & learn to live, and in relation to everything – not isolated. This isolation is death to me.

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

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

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
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