Katherine Mansfield Quotes

The great thing to remember is we can do whatever we wish to do provided our wish is strong enough.

There is no feeling to be compared with the feeling of having written and finished a story.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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?

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.

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

There are always these moments in life when the limits of suffering are reached and we become heroes and heroines.

I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.

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.

I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.... This all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, it's no longer so. I feel happy- deep down. All is well.

Children are unaccountable little creatures.

Wind moving through grass so that the grass quivers. This moves me with an emotion I don't even understand.

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.

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

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.

I have such a horror of telegrams that ask me how I am!! I always want to reply dead.

I want, by understanding myself, to understand others.

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

conversation is like a dear little baby that is brought in to be handed round. You must rock it, nurse it, keep it on the move if you want it to keep smiling.

Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order.

The whole world shall be ours because of our love.

we cling to our last pleasures as the tree clings to its last leaves.

Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.

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

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.

The mind I love must have wild places.

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.

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

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?

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.

It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves.

I love the evening star. Does that sound foolish? I used to go into the backyard, after sunset, and wait for it until it shone above the dark gum tree. I used to whisper 'There you are, my darling.' And just in that first moment it seemed to be shining for me alone. It seemed to understand this ... something which is like longing, and yet it is not longing. Or regret - it is more like regret.

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

Risk! Risk anything! 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.

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.

You have never been curious about me; you never wanted to explore my soul.

What do you want most to do? That's what I have to keep asking myself, in the face of difficulties.

I think of you often. Especially in the evenings, when I am on the balcony and it’s too dark to write or to do anything but wait for the stars. A time I love. One feels half disembodied, sitting like a shadow at the door of one’s being while the dark tide rises. Then comes the moon, marvellously serene, and small stars, very merry for some reason of their own. It is so easy to forget, in a worldly life, to attend to these miracles.

Do the hardest thing on earth for you. ACT YOURSELF.

Outside the sky is light with stars

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.

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.

To be alive and to be a ‘writer’ is enough.

Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different.