Katherine Mansfield quotes

Katherine Mansfield was a New Zealand-born modernist writer, renowned for her innovative short stories and vivid prose. Her work explored themes of human psychology, relationships, and the subtleties of everyday life. She influenced the development of the short story as a literary form in the early twentieth century. Here are 56 of her quotes:

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

Katherine Mansfield

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

Katherine Mansfield

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.

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

I'm a writer first and a woman after.

Katherine Mansfield

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

Katherine Mansfield

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

Katherine Mansfield

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

Katherine Mansfield

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

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

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

Katherine Mansfield

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

Katherine Mansfield

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

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

I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing (Though I may write about cabmen. That's no matter.) But warm, eager, living life - to be rooted in life - to learn, to desire, to feel, to think, to act. This is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for.

Katherine Mansfield

If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools. With mushrooms it is so simple - you salt them well, put them aside and have patience. But with love, you have no sooner lighted on anything that bears even the remotest resemblance to it than you are perfectly certain it is not only a genuine specimen, but perhaps the only genuine mushroom ungathered.

Katherine Mansfield

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.

Katherine Mansfield

Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.

Katherine Mansfield

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

Katherine Mansfield

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

Katherine Mansfield

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.

Katherine Mansfield

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.

Katherine Mansfield