“I love the night. I love to feel the tide of darkness rising, slowly and slowly washing, turning over and over, lifting, floating, all that lies strewn upon the dark beach, all that lies hid in rocky hollows.”
Source: The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
“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.”
Source: Letters to John Middleton Murry, 1913-1922
“we cling to our last pleasures as the tree clings to its last leaves.”
Source: The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
“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