Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Katherine Mansfield

Quote by Katherine Mansfield

Author

Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield was a New Zealand-born British writer renowned for her short stories. Her work is celebrated for its concise, direct style and profound insight into the details of everyday life. Although her writing career was brief, her influence on literature has been profound. more

You May Also Like

“Men's lives are not progressions, as conventionally rendered in history paintings, nor are they a series of facts that may be enumerated & in their proper order understood. Rather they are a series of transformations, some immediate & shocking, some so slow as to be imperceptible, yet so complete & horrifying that at the end of his life a man may search his memory in vain for a moment of correspondence between his self in his dotage & him in his youth.”

“The boundaries of this world are forever shifting – from day to night, joy to sorrow, love to hate, and from life itself to death; and who can say at what moment we may suddenly cross over the border, from one state of existence to another, like heat applied to some flammable substance? I have been given my own ever-changing margins, across which I move, continually and hungrily, like a migrating animal. Now civilized, now untamed; now responsive to decency and human concern, now viciously attuned to the darkest of desires.”