Top 120 Katherine Mansfield Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “You have never been curious about me; you never wanted to explore my soul.”

— Katherine Mansfield

102. “I used to believe I was merely words and I do not know whether I shall start hoping for something more. You planted that sense of hope in a secret deeply hidden place; it had walls made of bricks and huge abandoned gardens full of despair. It was covered in dusty waves and it was kept underground where no soul would ever walk. And you walked there – you planted hope. And now I cannot imagine myself without it.”

— Katherine Mansfield

103. “The breeze of morning lifted in the bush and the smell of leaves and wet black earth mingled with the sharp smell of the sea. Myriads of birds were singing. A goldfinch flew over the shepherd’s head and, perching on the tiptop of a spray, it turned to the sun, ruffling its small breast feathers. And now they had passed the fisherman’s hut, passed the charred-looking lit.”

— Katherine Mansfield

104. “Why it should be such an effort to write to the people one loves I can’t imagine. It’s none at all to write to those who don’t really count.”

— Katherine Mansfield

105. “EM Forster never gets any further than warming the tea pot... Is it not beautifully warm? Yes, but there ain’t going to be no tea.”

— Katherine Mansfield

106. “I feel as though I were living in a world of strange beings – do you? It’s people that make things so – silly. As long as you can keep away from them you’re safe and you’re happy.”

— Katherine Mansfield

107. “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 plusses.”

— Katherine Mansfield

108. “Don’t forget that dragons are only guardians of treasures and one fights them for what they keep – not for themselves...”

— Katherine Mansfield

109. “Tidied all my papers. Tore up and ruthlessly destroyed much. This is always a great satisfaction.”

— Katherine Mansfield

110. “It is strange that there are times when I feel the stars are not at all solemn: they are secretly gay.”

— Katherine Mansfield

111. “It is true when you are by yourself and you think about life, it is always sad. All that excitement and so on has a way of suddenly leaving you, and it’s as though, in the silence, somebody called your name, and you heard your name for the first time.”

— Katherine Mansfield

112. “Every time one leaves anywhere, something precious, which ought not to be killed, is left to die.”

— Katherine Mansfield

113. “Last night I spent in her arms – and tonight I hate her – which being interpreted, means that I adore her; that I cannot lie in my bed and not feel the magic of her body. I feel more powerfully all those so-termed sexual impulses with her than I have with any man. She enthrals, enslaves me – and her personal self – her body absolute – is my worship.”

— Katherine Mansfield

114. “The late afternoon sun shone on women in cotton frocks and little sunburnt, barefoot children. It blazed on a silky yellow flower with coarse leaves which sprawled over a bank of rock. The air ruffling through the window smelled of the sea.”

— Katherine Mansfield

115. “I love to close my eyes a moment and think of the land outside, white under the mingled snow and moonlight – the heaps of stones by the roadside white – snow in the furrows. Mon Dieu! How quiet and how patient!”

— Katherine Mansfield

116. “My love, my sweet love, I live in another world. A kinder and simpler world. A world of moons and stars and forests, a world filled with danger and magical beauty. It’s the old world but to me it’s new. You must not be fearful, dear, I quite like it there.”

— Katherine Mansfield

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

— Katherine Mansfield

118. “I have such a horror of telegrams that ask me how I am!! I always want to reply dead.”

— Katherine Mansfield

119. “I thought how true it was that the world was a delightful place if it were not for the people, and how more than true it was that people were not worth troubling about, and that wise men should set their affections upon nothing smaller than cities, heavenly or otherwise, and countrysides which are always heavenly.”

— Katherine Mansfield

120. “There is no feeling to be compared with the feeling of having written and finished a story.”

— Katherine Mansfield

121. “Why does one feel so different at night? Why is it so exciting to be awake when everybody else is asleep? Late – it is very late! And yet every moment you feel more and more wakeful, as though you were slowly, almost with every breath, waking up into a new, wonderful, far more thrilling and exciting world than the daylight one.”

— Katherine Mansfield

122. “Well, Mr. Arnold, here’s Mrs. Hammond at last!” The manager led them through the hall himself and pressed the elevator-bell. Hammond knew there were business pals of his sitting at the little hall tables having a drink before dinner. But he wasn’t going to risk interruption; he looked neither to the right nor the left.”

— Katherine Mansfield

123. “You’re not very fond of your room by day. You never think about it. You’re in and out, the door opens and slams, the cupboard creaks. You sit down on the side of your bed, change your shoes and dash out again. A dive down to the glass, two pins in your hair, powder your nose and off again. But now–at night time- it’s suddenly dear to you. It’s a darling little funny room. It’s yours. Oh, what a joy it is to own things!”

— Katherine Mansfield

124. “But the more poetry one reads the more one longs to read!”

— Katherine Mansfield

125. “And I feel as I always do that Autumn is loveliest of all. There is such a sharpness with the sweetness –.”

— Katherine Mansfield

126. “Sleeping was her latest discovery. ‘It’s so wonderful. One simply shuts one’s eyes, that’s all. It’s so delicious.”

— Katherine Mansfield

127. “I am tired, blissfully tired. Do you suppose that daisies feel blissfully tired when they shut for the night and the dews descend upon them?”

— Katherine Mansfield

128. “Delighted of course. It will only be a very scratch meal – just the sandwich crusts and broken meringue-shells and what’s left over. Yes, isn’t it a perfect morning?”

— Katherine Mansfield

129. “Do you ever want to hide, to be completely hidden so that nobody knows where you are. Sometimes one has a dreadful feeling of exposure–it’s intolerable. I mustn’t say these things.”

— Katherine Mansfield

130. “But my anxious heart is eating up my body, eating up my nerves, eating up my brain. I feel this poison slowly filling my veins – every particle becoming slowly tainted... I am never, never calm, never for an instant.”

— Katherine Mansfield

131. “Yes, madam, it was all left to me. Oh, she did look sweet. I did her hair, soft-like, round her forehead, all in dainty.”

— Katherine Mansfield

132. “When Harry came I had his letters all ready, and the ring and a ducky little brooch he’d given me – a silver bird it was, with a chain in its beak, and on the end of the chain a heart with a dagger.”

— Katherine Mansfield

133. “Leila was sure ifhe partner didn’t come and she had to listen to that marvellous music and to watch the others sliding, gliding over the golden floor, she would die at least, or faint, or lift her arms and fly out of one of those dark windows that showed the stars.”

— Katherine Mansfield

134. “Even the photographs were on the mantelpiece and the medicine bottles on the shelf above the wash-stand. Her clothes lay across a chair – her outdoor things, a purple cape and a round hat with a plume in it. Looking at them she wished that she was going away from this house, too. And she saw herself driving away from them all in a little buggy, driving away from everybody and not even waving.”

— Katherine Mansfield

135. “You are a Queen. Let mine be the joy of giving you your kingdom.”

— Katherine Mansfield