Top 123 Quotes & Sayings by Katherine Mansfield

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

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

I'm a writer first and a woman after.

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

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

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

This is not a letter but my arms around you for a brief moment.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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. Regret is an appalling waste of energy, you can't build on it it's only good for wallowing in.

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.

Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.

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

What do you want most to do? That's what I have to keep asking myself, in the face of difficulties.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

The whole world shall be ours because of our love.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

I want, by understanding myself, to understand others.

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

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

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.

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

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

Life never become a habit to me. It's always a marvel.

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

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

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

Oh, how quickly things changed! Why didn't happiness last for ever? For ever wasn't a bit too long.

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

You have never been curious about me; you never wanted to explore my soul.

The mind I love must have wild places.

To long for everything: sorrow; to accept everything: joy.

I think of you often. Especially in the evenings, when I am on the balcony and it’s too dark to write or to do anything but wait for the stars. A time I love. One feels half disembodied, sitting like a shadow at the door of one’s being while the dark tide rises. Then comes the moon, marvellously serene, and small stars, very merry for some reason of their own. It is so easy to forget, in a worldly life, to attend to these miracles.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.