Katherine Mansfield Quotes

England is merely an island of beef swimming in a warm gulf stream of gravy.

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.

Regret is an appalling waste of time.

Better to write twaddle, anything, than nothing at all.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I must say, I hate money. But it's the lack of it I hate most.

Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.

You might drop your heart into me and you'd never hear it touch bottom.

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.

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

Oh, impossible. 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.

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.

The truth is friendship is every bit as sacred and eternal as marriage.

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.

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

I'm a writer first and a woman after.

That's all life is - something childish and very natural. Isn't it?

Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back.

To acknowledge the presence of fear is to give birth to failure.

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.

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

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.

No, no the mind I love must still have wild places - a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown litde wood, the chance of a snake or two (real snakes), a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with those litde flowers planted by the wind.

To long for everything: sorrow; to accept everything: joy.

By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with... the earth and the wonders thereof - the sea - the sun.

Life never become a habit to me. It's always a marvel.

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

It is strange that there are times when I feel the stars are not at all solemn: they are secretly gay.

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. I promise

Some couples go over their budgets very carefully every month. Others just go over them.

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.

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

If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools.

I love the rain. I want the feeling of it on my face.

September is different from all other months. It is more magical. I feel the strange chemical change in the earth which produces mushrooms is the cause, too, of the extra 'life' in the air - a resilience, a sparkle.

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.

There are in life as many aspects as attitudes towards it, and aspects change with attitudes.

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

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.

What happiness it is to listen to rain at night; joyful relief, ease; a lapping-round and hushing and brooding tenderness, all are mingled together in the sound of the fast-falling rain. God, looking down upon the rainy earth, sees how faint are these lights shining in little windows, - how easily put out.

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.

I love this place; I love mountains and big skies and forests. And the weather is still supremely beautiful even though the lower peaks are powdered with fresh snow. But Heavens! What sun. It never has an ending. I am basking at this minute - half past four - too hot without a hat, & the sky is that transparent blue only to be seen in autumn - the forest trees steeped in light.

We can do whatever we wish to do provided our wish is strong enough. But the tremendous effort needed- one doesn't always want to make it-does one? ... But what else can be done? What's the alternative? What do you want most to do? That's what I have to keep asking myself, in the face of difficulties.

I saw myself driving through Eternity in a timeless taxi.