Katherine Mansfield Quotes

Katherine Mansfield offers gentle, insightful musings on identity, reading and personal change.

45 quotes

1. 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.

2. To acknowledge the presence of fear is to give birth to failure.

3. To work - to work! It is such infinite delight to know that we still have the best things to do.

4. 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.

5. If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools. With mushrooms it is so simple - you salt them well, put them aside and have patience. But with love, you have no sooner lighted on anything that bears even the remotest resemblance to it than you are perfectly certain it is not only a genuine specimen, but perhaps the only genuine mushroom ungathered.

6. I'm a writer first & a woman after.

7. Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. This is the mystery. This is what I must do.

8. I have made it a rule of my life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy, and no one who intends to become a writer can afford to indulge in it. You can't get it into shape; you can't build on it; it's only good for wallowing in.

9. It's an infernal nuisance to love Life as I do. I seem to love it more as time goes on rather than less. It never becomes a habit to me. It's always a marvel. I do hope I'll be able to keep in it long enough to do some really good work. I'm sick of people dying who promise well.

10. Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order. This is what life has taught me.

11. The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.

12. Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.

13. Were we positive, eager, real - alive? No, we were not. We were a nothingness shot with gleams of what might be.

14. When we can begin to take our failures nonseriously, it means we are ceasing to be afraid of them. It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves.

15. Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.

16. By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love - the earth and the wonders thereof - the sea - the sun, all that we mean when we speak of the external world. I want to enter into it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious, direct human being. I want, by understanding myself, to understand others.

17. 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.

18. When I say 'I fear' - don't let it disturb you, dearest heart. We all fear when we are in waiting-rooms. Yet we must pass beyond them, and if the other can keep calm, it is all the help we can give each other.

19. 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. May you be happy too. I'm going to Fontainebleau on Monday and I'll be back here Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. All is well.

20. Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different. Life would undergo a change of appearance because we ourselves had undergone a change of attitude.

21. I am treating you as my friend, asking you to share my present minuses in the hope I can ask you to share my future pluses.

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

23. Some couples go over their budgets very carefully every month. Others just go over them.

24. The more you are motivated by love, the more fearless and free your actions will be.

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

26. All the wild sweetness of the flower Tangled against the wall. It was that magic, silent hour… The branches grew so tall They twined themselves into a bower. The sun shown ... and the fall Of yellow blossom on the grass! You feel that golden rain? Both of you could not hold, alas, (both of you tried, in vain) A memory, stranger. So I pass… It will not come again.

27. Children are unaccountable little creatures.

28. Regret is an appalling waste of time.

29. I love the rain. I want the feeling of it on my face.

30. England is merely an island of beef swimming in a warm gulf stream of gravy.

31. Perhaps it does not matter so very much what it is one loves in this world. But love something one must.

32. Ah, what happiness it is to be with people who are all happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes.

33. I am poor - obscure - just eighteen years of age - with a rapacious appetite for everything and principles as light as my purse.

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

35. 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.

36. You are a Queen. Let mine be the joy of giving you your kingdom.

37. There are in life as many aspects as attitudes towards it, and aspects change with attitudes.

38. But one day we shall be rich, and the next poor. One day we shall dine in a palace and the next we'll sit in a forest and toast mushrooms on a hatpin…

39. 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.

40. Warm, eager, living life-to be rooted in life-to learn, to desire, to know, to feel, to think, to act. This is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for.

41. I am going to enjoy life in Paris I know. It is so human and there is something noble in the city... It is a real city, old and fine and life plays in it for everybody to see.

42. Tidied all my papers. Tore up and ruthlessly destroyed much. This is always a great satisfaction.

43. Courage is like a disobedient dog, once it starts running away it flies all the faster for your attempts to recall it.

44. 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?

45. Why! Why! Why is the middle-class so stodgy - so utterly without a sense of humor?