Top 120 Katherine Mansfield Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “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.”

— Katherine Mansfield

3. “Warm, eager, living life-to be rooted in life-to learn, to desire, to know, to feel, to think, to act. This is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for.”

— Katherine Mansfield

4. “I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.”

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

6. “If you wish to live, you must first attend your own funeral.”

— Katherine Mansfield

7. “I want, by understanding myself, to understand others.”

— Katherine Mansfield

8. “The mind I love must 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 flowers planted by the mind.”

— Katherine Mansfield

9. “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.”

— Katherine Mansfield

10. “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.”

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

12. “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

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

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

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15. “You might drop your heart into me and you’d never hear it touch bottom.”

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

17. “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

18. “Outside the sky is light with stars.”

— Katherine Mansfield

19. “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?”

— Katherine Mansfield

20. “Can one do nothing for the dead? And for a long time the answer had been – Nothing!”

— Katherine Mansfield

21. “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.”

— Katherine Mansfield

22. “I am poor – obscure – just eighteen years of age – with a rapacious appetite for everything and principles as light as my purse.”

— Katherine Mansfield

23. “Why! Why! Why is the middle-class so stodgy – so utterly without a sense of humor?”

— Katherine Mansfield

24. “I must say, I hate money. But it’s the lack of it I hate most.”

— Katherine Mansfield

25. “Yes, my mother’s death is a terrible sorrow to me. I feel – do you know what I mean – the silence of it so. She was more alive than anyone I have ever known.”

— Katherine Mansfield

26. “I feel I must live alone, alone, alone – with artists only to touch the door. Every artist cuts off his ear and nails it on the outside of the door for the others to shout into.”

— Katherine Mansfield

27. “I love the night. I love to feel the tide of darkness rising, slowly and slowly washing, turning over and over, lifting, floating, all that lies strewn upon the dark beach, all that lies hid in rocky hollows.”

— Katherine Mansfield

28. “Children are unaccountable little creatures.”

— Katherine Mansfield

29. “Do the hardest thing on earth for you. ACT YOURSELF.”

— Katherine Mansfield

30. “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

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

— Katherine Mansfield

32. “It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves.”

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

35. “To be alive and to be a ‘writer’ is enough.”

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

37. “Courage is like a disobedient dog, once it starts running away it flies all the faster for your attempts to recall it.”

— Katherine Mansfield

38. “I saw myself driving through Eternity in a timeless taxi.”

— Katherine Mansfield

39. “The ostrich burying its head in the sand does at any rate wish to convey the impression that its head is the most important part of it.”

— Katherine Mansfield

40. “Ah, what happiness it is to be with people who are all happy, to press hands, press cheeks, smile into eyes.”

— Katherine Mansfield

41. “Regret is an appalling waste of energy, and no one who intends to be a writer can afford to indulge in it.”

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

43. “The mind I love must have wild places.”

— Katherine Mansfield

44. “What did garden-parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things. He was wonderful, beautiful.”

— Katherine Mansfield

45. “But one day we shall be rich, and the next poor. One day we shall dine in a palace and the next we’ll sit in a forest and toast mushrooms on a hatpin...”

— Katherine Mansfield

46. “I think I hate snow, downright hate it. There is something stupefying in it, a kind of ‘You must be worse before you’re better,’ and down it spins.”

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

48. “Laura’s upbringing made her wonder for a moment whether it was quite respectful of a workman to talk to her of bangs slap in the eye. But she did quite follow him.”

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

50. “Wind moving through grass so that the grass quivers. This moves me with an emotion I don’t even understand.”

— Katherine Mansfield