Katherine Mansfield
Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order.Collection: Death
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.Collection: Alone
I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.Collection: Friendship
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.Collection: Truth
Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different.Collection: Change
Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.Collection: Change
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.
I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.
I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.
When we can begin to take our failures seriously, it means we are ceasing to be afraid of them. It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves.
I'm a writer first and a woman after.
This is not a letter but my arms around you for a brief moment.
I love the rain. I want the feeling of it on my face.
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.
Life never becomes a habit to me. It's always a marvel.
Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.
Some couples go over their budgets very carefully every month. Others just go over them.
The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.
Once we have learned to read, meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness.
If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools.
It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves.
What do you want most to do? That's what I have to keep asking myself, in the face of difficulties.
That's all life is - something childish and very natural. Isn't it?Collection: Life Is
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.Collection: Rags
If you wish to live, you must first attend your own funeral.Collection: Philosophy
The mind I love must have wild places.Collection: Wild Places
Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back.Collection: Regret
To long for everything: sorrow; to accept everything: joy.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Giving
Do the hardest thing on earth for you. ACT YOURSELF.Collection: Risk
Life never become a habit to me. It's always a marvel.Collection: Life
I want, by understanding myself, to understand others.Collection: Understanding
There is no feeling to be compared with the feeling of having written and finished a story.Collection: Feelings
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 promiseCollection: Love
I think of you often. Especially in the evenings, when I am on the balcony and it’s too dark to write or to do anything but wait for the stars. A time I love. One feels half disembodied, sitting like a shadow at the door of one’s being while the dark tide rises. Then comes the moon, marvellously serene, and small stars, very merry for some reason of their own. It is so easy to forget, in a worldly life, to attend to these miracles.Collection: Stars
It's rather nice to think of oneself as a sailor bending over the map of one's mind and deciding where to go and how to go. The great thing to remember is we can do whatever we wish to do provided our wish is strong enough.Collection: Strong
Whatever happens I have had these blissful, perfect moments and they are worth living for.Collection: Perfect
My love for you tonight is so deep and tender that it seems to be outside myself as well.Collection: My Love For You
Ach, Tchekov! Why are you dead? Why can’t I talk to you in a big darkish room at late evening—where the light is green from the waving trees outside? I’d like to write a series of Heavens: that would be one.Collection: Writing
The great thing to remember is we can do whatever we wish to do provided our wish is strong enough.Collection: Strong
There are in life as many aspects as attitudes towards it, and aspects change with attitudes.Collection: Success
Oh, how quickly things changed! Why didn't happiness last for ever? For ever wasn't a bit too long.Collection: Long
To acknowledge the presence of fear is to give birth to failure.Collection: Fear
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.Collection: Beach
In fact, isn't it a joy - there is hardly a greater one - to find a new book, a living book, and to know that it will remain with you while life lasts?Collection: Book
Oh, impossible. Fancy cream puffs so soon after breakfast. The very idea made one shudder. All the same, two minutes later Jose and Laura were licking their fingers with that absorbed inward look that only comes from whipped cream.Collection: Ideas
Isn't life,' she stammered, 'isn't life--' But what life was she couldn't explain. No matter. He quite understood. 'Isn't it, darling?' said Laurie.Collection: Matter
We can do whatever we wish to do provided our wish is strong enough. But the tremendous effort needed- one doesn't always want to make it-does one? ... But what else can be done? What's the alternative? What do you want most to do? That's what I have to keep asking myself, in the face of difficulties.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Mushrooms
England is merely an island of beef swimming in a warm gulf stream of gravy.Collection: Food