“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.”
Source: The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
“There is no feeling to be compared with the feeling of having written and finished a story.”
“Perhaps it does not matter so very much what it is one loves in this world. But love something one must.”
Source: KATHERINE MANSFIELD Premium Collection: 160+ Short Stories & Poems (Literature Classics Series): The Complete Short Stories and Poetry of Katherine Mansfield: Bliss, The Garden Party, The Dove’s Nest, Something Childish, In a German Pension, The Aloe, Poems at the Villa Pauline, Child Verses...
“... I'd always rather be with people who loved me too little rather than with people who loved me too much.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: 1922-1923
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: KATHERINE MANSFIELD Premium Collection: 160+ Short Stories & Poems (Literature Classics Series): The Complete Short Stories and Poetry of Katherine Mansfield: Bliss, The Garden Party, The Dove’s Nest, Something Childish, In a German Pension, The Aloe, Poems at the Villa Pauline, Child Verses...
“In fact, isn't it a joy - there is hardly a greater one - to find a new book, a living book, and to know that it will remain with you while life lasts?”
Source: Letters to John Middleton Murry, 1913-1922
“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.”
Source: KATHERINE MANSFIELD Premium Collection: 160+ Short Stories & Poems (Literature Classics Series): The Complete Short Stories and Poetry of Katherine Mansfield: Bliss, The Garden Party, The Dove’s Nest, Something Childish, In a German Pension, The Aloe, Poems at the Villa Pauline, Child Verses...
“Children are unaccountable little creatures.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield
“Courage is like a disobedient dog, once it starts running away it flies all the faster for your attempts to recall it.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume II: 1918-September 1919
“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.”
Source: The Letters of Katherine Mansfield
“Can one do nothing for the dead? And for a long time the answer had been - Nothing!”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield (Illustrated)
“England is merely an island of beef swimming in a warm gulf stream of gravy.”
Source: Stories
“Regret is an appalling waste of energy, and no one who intends to be a writer can afford to indulge in it.”
Source: Bliss, and Other Stories
“I am poor - obscure - just eighteen years of age - with a rapacious appetite for everything and principles as light as my purse.”
Source: Katherine Mansfield: selected letters
“Oh, how quickly things changed! Why didn't happiness last for ever? For ever wasn't a bit too long.”
Source: KATHERINE MANSFIELD Premium Collection: 160+ Short Stories & Poems (Literature Classics Series): The Complete Short Stories and Poetry of Katherine Mansfield: Bliss, The Garden Party, The Dove’s Nest, Something Childish, In a German Pension, The Aloe, Poems at the Villa Pauline, Child Verses...
“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.”
Source: The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
“Wind moving through grass so that the grass quivers. This moves me with an emotion I don't even understand.”
Source: The Katherine Mansfield notebooks
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield (Illustrated)
“The whole world shall be ours because of our love.”
Source: The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
“I want, by understanding myself, to understand others.”
“Better to write twaddle, anything, than nothing at all.”
“Who is to decide between 'Let it be' and 'Force it'?”
Source: journal
“To long for everything: sorrow; to accept everything: joy.”
“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.”
Source: journal
“I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.”
Source: The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume II: 1918-September 1919
“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.”
“Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different.”
“Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.”
“The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.”
Source: The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: 1922-1923
“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.”
Source: The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: 1903-1917
“I'm a writer first and a woman after.”
Source: Letters to John Middleton Murry, 1913-1922
“Some couples go over their budgets very carefully every month. Others just go over them.”
“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.”
Source: The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: 1922-1923
“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.”
“I saw myself driving through Eternity in a timeless taxi.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield (Illustrated)
“When we begin to take our failures non-seriously, it means we are ceasing to be afraid of them.”
Source: The Katherine Mansfield notebooks
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield (Illustrated)
“I have such a horror of telegrams that ask me how I am!! I always want to reply dead.”
Source: The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: 1922-1923
“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.”
Source: The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: 1919-1920
“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.”
Source: The Katherine Mansfield notebooks
“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?”
Source: KATHERINE MANSFIELD – The Ultimate Short Stories & Poetry Collection: 100+ Titles in One Volume (Literature Classics Series): Prelude, Bliss, At the Bay, The Garden Party, A Birthday, Poems at the Villa Pauline, Child Verses and many more
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield (Illustrated)
“I am a recluse at present & do nothing but write & read & read & write”
Source: The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: 1903-1917
“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.”
Source: The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield: 1922-1923
