Katherine Mansfield Quotes

If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools.

Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different.

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.

How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you — you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences — like rags and shreds of your very life.

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.

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

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

Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back.

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

The mind I love must have wild places.

I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.

It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves.

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.

Bless you, my darling, and remember you are always in the heart - oh tucked so close there is no chance of escape - of your sister.

There are always these moments in life when the limits of suffering are reached and we become heroes and heroines.

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.

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

The truth is friendship is every bit as sacred and eternal as marriage.

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

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?

When we begin to take our failures non-seriously, it means we are ceasing to be afraid of them.

Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.

You might drop your heart into me and you'd never hear it touch bottom.

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?

My love for you tonight is so deep and tender that it seems to be outside myself as well.

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

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

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.

What I feel for you can’t be conveyed in phrasal combinations; It either screams out loud or stays painfully silent but I promise — it beats words. It beats worlds. I promise

Now's the time when children's noses All become as red as roses And the colour of their faces Makes me think of orchard places Where the juicy apples grow, And tomatoes in a row.

I have such a horror of telegrams that ask me how I am!! I always want to reply dead.

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.

I am a recluse at present & do nothing but write & read & read & write

I must say, I hate money. But it's the lack of it I hate most.

Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order.

There is no feeling to be compared with the feeling of having written and finished a story.

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

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.

Do the hardest thing on earth for you. ACT YOURSELF.

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

Regret is an appalling waste of time.

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.

By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with... the earth and the wonders thereof - the sea - the sun.

Regret is an appalling waste of energy, and no one who intends to be a writer can afford to indulge in it.

Can one do nothing for the dead? And for a long time the answer had been - Nothing!

The whole world shall be ours because of our love.

I want, by understanding myself, to understand others.

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

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

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.