“But the more poetry one reads the more one longs to read!”
Source: The Letters of Katherine Mansfield
“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.”
“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.”
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...
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield (Illustrated)
“It is strange that there are times when I feel the stars are not at all solemn: they are secretly gay.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Undiscovered country: the New Zealand stories of Katherine Mansfield
“In the woods where snow is thick, bars of sunlight lay like pale fire.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: The Katherine Mansfield notebooks
“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