Katherine Mansfield quotes

1888-1923, New Zealandan author

We can do whatever we wish to do provided our wish is strong enough. What do you want
most to do? That's what I have to keep asking myself, in the face of difficulties.
Katherine Mansfield

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.
Katherine Mansfield

I have made it a rule of my 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.
Katherine Mansfield

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

I adore life. What do all the fools matter and all the stupidity? They do matter but somehow
for me they cannot touch the body of life. Life is marvellous. I want to be deeply rooted in it
- to live - to expand - to breathe in it - to rejoice - to share it. To give and to be asked for
love.
Katherine Mansfield

I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of
becoming.
Katherine Mansfield

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

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

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 pluses.
Katherine Mansfield

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.
Katherine Mansfield

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

I'm a writer first and a woman after.
Katherine Mansfield

Life never becomes a habit to me. It's always a marvel.
Katherine Mansfield

The mind I love must still have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the
heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody's
fathomed the depth of - and paths threaded with those little flowers planted by the mind.
Katherine Mansfield

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

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

If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools!
Katherine Mansfield

Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become love.
That is the mystery.
Katherine Mansfield

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.
Katherine Mansfield

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.
Katherine Mansfield

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

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.
Katherine Mansfield

The truth is that every true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone
- reading between the lines - has become the secret friend of their author.
Katherine Mansfield

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