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 am going to enjoy life in Paris I know. It is so human and there is something noble in the
city. It is a real city, old and fine and life plays in it for everybody to see.
– 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