Katherine Mansfield Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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.

Whatever happens I have had these blissful, perfect moments and they are worth living for.

No, no the mind I love must still have wild places - a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown litde wood, the chance of a snake or two (real snakes), a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with those litde flowers planted by the wind.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Who is to decide between 'Let it be' and 'Force it'?

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.

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.

I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.... 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. All is well.

The great thing to remember is we can do whatever we wish to do provided our wish is strong enough.

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.

I'm a writer first and a woman after.

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.

What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss - absolute bliss - as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle into every finger and toe?

Do you remember your childhood? I am always coming across these marvelous accounts by writers who declare that they remember 'everything.' I certainly don't. The dark stretches, the blanks, are much bigger than the bright glimpses. I seem to have spent most of my time like a plant in a cupboard.