Top 100 Katherine Mansfield Quotes
#1. 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
#2. The Samuel Josephs were not a family. They were a swarm. The moment you entered the house they cropped up and jumped out at you from under the tables, through the stair rails, behind the doors, behind the coats in the passage. Impossible to count them: impossible to distinguish between them.
Katherine Mansfield
#4. Mrs. Stubbs, and she pointed dramatically to the life-size head and shoulders of a burly man with a dead white rose in the buttonhole of his coat that made you think of a curl of cold mutting fat. Just below, in silver
Katherine Mansfield
#5. I love to close my eyes a moment and think of the land outside, white under the mingled snow and moonlight--the heaps of stones by the roadside white--snow in the furrows. Mon Dieu! How quiet and how patient!
Katherine Mansfield
#6. 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 - like rags and shreds of your very life.
Katherine Mansfield
#7. There is no feeling to be compared with the feeling of having written and finished a story.
Katherine Mansfield
#8. Delighted of course. It will only be a very scratch meal - just the sandwich crusts and broken meringue-shells and what's left over. Yes, isn't it a perfect morning?
Katherine Mansfield
#10. Tidied all my papers. Tore up and ruthlessly destroyed much. This is always a great satisfaction.
Katherine Mansfield
#11. I am treating you as my friend, asking you to share my present minuses in the hope that I can ask you to share my future plusses.
Katherine Mansfield
#12. Isn't life,' she stammered, 'isn't life
' But what life was she couldn't explain. No matter. He quite understood.
'Isn't it, darling?' said Laurie.
Katherine Mansfield
#13. Ma Parker stood, looking up and down. The icy wind blew out her apron into a balloon. And now it began to rain. There was nowhere.
Katherine Mansfield
#14. Why! Why! Why is the middle-class so stodgy - so utterly without a sense of humor?
Katherine Mansfield
#15. Ach, Tchekov! Why are you dead? Why can't I talk to you in a big darkish room at late evening - where the light is green from the waving trees outside? I'd like to write a series of Heavens: that would be one.
Katherine Mansfield
#16. No, she never recovered, madam. She had a stroke at the end. Last words she ever said was - very slow, "Look in - the - Look - in - " And then she was gone.
Katherine Mansfield
#17. 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
#18. It is true when you are by yourself and you think about life, it is always sad. All that excitement and so on has a way of suddenly leaving you, and it's as though, in the silence, somebody called your name, and you heard your name for the first time.
Katherine Mansfield
#19. I believe that people are like portmanteaux - packed with certain things, started going, thrown about, tossed away, dumped down, lost and found, half emptied suddenly, or squeezed fatter than ever, until finally the Ultimate Porter swings them on to the Ultimate Train and away they rattle ...
Katherine Mansfield
#20. What do you want most to do? That's what I have to keep asking myself, in the face of difficulties.
Katherine Mansfield
#22. Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order.
Katherine Mansfield
#23. Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.
Katherine Mansfield
#24. Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can't build on it; it's only good for wallowing in.
Katherine Mansfield
#27. Oh but I want to be a bee frightfully,' wailed Kezia... A tiny bee, all yellow-furry, with striped legs. She drew her legs up under her and leaned over the table. She felt she was a bee.
Katherine Mansfield
#28. I am a recluse at present & do nothing but write & read & read & write
Katherine Mansfield
#30. That is the fearful part of having been near death. One knows how easy it is to die. The barriers that are up for everybody else are down for you, and you've only to slip through.
Katherine Mansfield
#31. 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
#32. Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began.
Katherine Mansfield
#33. She had become really quite expert, she thought, at listening as though she didn't listen, at sitting in other people's lives just for a minute while they talked round her.
Katherine Mansfield
#34. Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different. Life would undergo a change of appearance because we ourselves had undergone a change of attitude.
Katherine Mansfield
#35. Ah, what happiness it is to be with people who are all happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes.
Katherine Mansfield
#36. Oh dear, I sometimes think ... whatever should I do if anything were to ... But, there, thinking's no good to any one - is it, madam?
Katherine Mansfield
#39. In the woods where snow is thick, bars of sunlight lay like pale fire.
Katherine Mansfield
#40. Sleeping was her latest discovery. 'It's so wonderful. One simply shuts one's eyes, that's all. It's so delicious.
Katherine Mansfield
#41. Perhaps it does not matter so very much what it is one loves in this world. But love something one must.
Katherine Mansfield
#43. There are in life as many aspects as attitudes towards it, and aspects change with attitudes.
Katherine Mansfield
#44. I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella.
Katherine Mansfield
#45. Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others ... Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.
(Journal entry, 14 October 1922)
Katherine Mansfield
#48. Jose loved giving orders to the servants, and they loved obeying her. She always made them feel they were taking part in some drama.
Katherine Mansfield
#49. The truth is friendship is every bit as sacred and eternal as marriage.
Katherine Mansfield
#50. ... A wet night. They are going home together under an umbrella. They stop on the door to press their wet cheeks together.
Katherine Mansfield
#51. Do you feel in this letter my love for you today - It is as warm as a bird's nest.
Katherine Mansfield
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools.
Katherine Mansfield
#55. Ellen, not for the wide world! But while she said it, madam - I was looking in her glass; of course, she didn't know I could see her - she put her little hand on her heart just like her dear mother used to, and lifted her eyes ... Oh, madam!
Katherine Mansfield
#56. Finally the little flat spoons lay still on the glass plates. Hennie looked rather exhausted, but she pulled on her white gloves again. She had some trouble with her diamond wrist-watch; it got in her way.
Katherine Mansfield
#57. As in the physical world, so in the spiritual world, pain does not last forever.
Katherine Mansfield
#58. Saw the sun rise. A lovely apricot sky with flames in it and then solemn pink. Heavens, how beautiful...I feel so full of love to-day after having seen the sun rise.
Katherine Mansfield
#59. Laura's upbringing made her wonder for a moment whether it was quite respectful of a workman to talk to her of bangs slap in the eye. But she did quite follow him.
Katherine Mansfield
#61. What I feel for you can't be conveyed in phrasal combinations; It either screams out loud or stays painfully silent but I promise - it beats words. It beats worlds.
Katherine Mansfield
#62. Can one do nothing for the dead? And for a long time the answer had been - Nothing!
Katherine Mansfield
#63. 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
#64. Regret is an appalling waste of energy, and no one who intends to be a writer can afford to indulge in it.
Katherine Mansfield
#65. 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
#67. 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
#69. Hail, brother! All hail, Thou Mighty One!" A velvety bass voice came booming over the water. Great
Katherine Mansfield
#70. his hands clasped over a huge carved walking-stick, and a big old woman, sitting upright, with a roll of knitting on her embroidered
Katherine Mansfield
#71. 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
#72. When we begin to take our failures non-seriously, it means we are ceasing to be afraid of them.
Katherine Mansfield
#73. You might drop your heart into me and you'd never hear it touch bottom.
Katherine Mansfield
#74. 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
#75. Roses are the only flowers at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing.
Katherine Mansfield
#76. I have such a horror of telegrams that ask me how I am!! I always want to reply dead.
Katherine Mansfield
#77. It's rather nice to think of oneself as a sailor bending over the map of one's mind and deciding where to go and how to go. The great thing to remember is we can do whatever we wish to do provided our wish is strong enough.
Katherine Mansfield
#80. 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
#81. Every time one leaves anywhere, something precious, which ought not to be killed, is left to die.
Katherine Mansfield
#82. We might be fifty, we might be five,
So snug, so compact, so wise are we!
Under the kitchen-table leg
My knee is pressing against his knee.
Katherine Mansfield
#83. I think I hate snow, downright hate it. There is something stupefying in it, a kind of 'You must be worse before you're better,' and down it spins.
Katherine Mansfield
#84. There does seem to me something sad in life. It is hard to say what it is. I don't mean the sorrow that we all know, like illness and poverty and death. No, it is something different. It is there, deep down, deep down, part of one, like one's breathing.
Katherine Mansfield
#85. The mind I love most must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.
Katherine Mansfield
#86. Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.
Katherine Mansfield
#87. 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
#88. There are always these moments in life when the limits of suffering are reached and we become heroes and heroines.
Katherine Mansfield
#89. 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
#90. Courage is like a disobedient dog, once it starts running away it flies all the faster for your attempts to recall it.
Katherine Mansfield
#92. 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
#93. Some couples go over their budgets very carefully every month. Others just go over them.
Katherine Mansfield
#94. Got a little - well - feeble as you might say. Of course, she was never dangerous; she was the sweetest old lady.
Katherine Mansfield
#95. Whatever happens I have had these blissful, perfect moments and they are worth living for.
Katherine Mansfield
#96. The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.
Katherine Mansfield
#98. Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. That is the mystery.
Katherine Mansfield
#99. No, madam, never now. Of course, I did think of it at one time. But it wasn't to be. He had a little flower-shop just down
Katherine Mansfield
#100. 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
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