Top 120 Katherine Mansfield Quotes (2025 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. “If you wish to live, you must first attend your own funeral.”

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

7. “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

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

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

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

13. “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

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

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

18. “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

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

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

23. “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

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

— Katherine Mansfield

25. “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

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

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “Children are unaccountable little creatures.”

— Katherine Mansfield

34. “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

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

— Katherine Mansfield

36. “The late evening is the time of times. Then with that unearthly beauty before one it is not hard to realise how far one has to go. To write something that will be worthy of that rising moon, that pale light.”

— Katherine Mansfield

37. “In the woods where snow is thick, bars of sunlight lay like pale fire.”

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

41. “The English language is damned difficult, but it’s also damned rich, and so clear and bright that you can search out the darkest places with it.”

— Katherine Mansfield

42. “I am always conscious of this secret disruption in me.”

— Katherine Mansfield

43. “I’m a writer first and a woman after.”

— Katherine Mansfield

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

44. “You know the feeling that a great writer gives you: my spirit has been fed and refreshed; it has partaken of something new.”

— Katherine Mansfield

45. “You put me in touch with my own soul.”

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

47. “But the pear tree was as lovely as ever and as full of flower and as still.”

— Katherine Mansfield

48. “I have faded into the habit of secretly existing under your skin. It is unbelievably dark under there; I am happy.”

— Katherine Mansfield

49. “It was her peculiar curse to never really be unknown.”

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield