Katherine Mansfield Quotes

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

  Katherine Mansfield

  Topics in Fear

• The longer I live the more I turn to New Zealand. I thank God I was born in New Zealand. A young country is a real heritage, though it takes onetime to recognize it. But  New Zealand is in my very bones. What I wouldn’t give to have a look at it!

  Katherine Mansfield

  Topics in Uncategorized

• She couldn’t possibly go back to the gentleman’s flat; she had no right to cry in strangers’ houses.

  Katherine Mansfield

  Topics in Uncategorized

• He stands, smiling encouragement, like a clumsy dentist.

  Katherine Mansfield

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The aloe seemed to ride…like a ship with the oars lifted. Bright moonlight hung upon the lifted oars like water, and on the green wave glittered the dew.

  Katherine Mansfield

  Topics in Uncategorized

• If there was one thing he hated more than another it was the way she had of waking him in the morning… It was her way of establishing her grievance for the day.

  Katherine Mansfield

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I believe that people are like portmanteaux—packed with certain things, started going, thrown about, tossed away, dumped down, lost and found, half emptied  suddenly, or squeezed fatter than ever, until finally the Ultimate Porter swings them on to the Ultimate Train and away they rattle.

  Katherine Mansfield

  Topics in Uncategorized

• True to oneself! Which self? Which of my many…hundreds of selves?… There are moments when  I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor, who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the wilful guests.

  Katherine Mansfield

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Her underlip protruded a little; she had a way of sucking it in that somebody else had told her was awfully fascinating.

  Katherine Mansfield

  Topics in Uncategorized

• I want for one moment to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the Old World. It must be mysterious, as though floating. It must take the breath. It must be ‘one of those islands…’.

  Katherine Mansfield

  Topics in Uncategorized

• The trouble with women like me is—they can’t keep their nerves out of the job in hand… I walk about with a mind full of ghosts of saucepans and primus stoves and ‘Will there be enough to go round?’ I loathe myself, today. I detest this woman who ‘superintends’ you and rushes about, slamming doors and slopping water—all  untidy with her blouse out and her nails grimed.

  Katherine Mansfield

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Why haven’t I got a real ‘home’—a real life—why haven’t I got a Chinese nurse with green trousers and two babies who rush at me and clasp my knees? I’m not a girl—I’m a  woman. I want things….all this love and joy that fights for outlet—and all this life drying up, like milk in an old breast.

  Katherine Mansfield

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Talk of our enlightened days and our emancipated country—pure nonsense! We are firmly held with the self-fashioned chains of slavery. Yes, now I see that they are self-fashioned, and must be self-removed.

  Katherine Mansfield

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Katherine Mansfield

  Topics in Friendship

  Tags in Friend

• 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 for wallowing in.

  Katherine Mansfield

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Regret, Creed, Credo, Energy

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

  Katherine Mansfield

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Budget

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

  Katherine Mansfield

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Book

• An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

  Victor Hugo

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Persistence, Readiness, Creativity

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

  Katherine Mansfield

  Topics in Friendship

  Tags in Always, Privilege, Great, Had, Explain, Felt, Relief, Comfort

• Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can’t build on it; it is only good for wallowing in.

  Katherine Mansfield

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Regret

Katherine Mansfield (36)

Birth:	14th October, 1888
Death:	9th January, 1923
Nationality:	New Zealander
Profession:	Writer

About

Katherine Mansfield was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. When she was 19, Mansfield left New Zealand and settled in the United Kingdom, where she became a friend of modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. In 1917 she was diagnosed with extrapulmonary tuberculosis, which led to her death at the age of 34.

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