Katherine Mansfield

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.

What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss - absolute bliss - as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle into every finger and toe?

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

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

I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.

This is not a letter but my arms around you for a brief moment.

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.

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

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?

I'm a writer first and a woman after.

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

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.

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

What is it with me? Am I absolutely nobody, but merely inordinately vain? I do not know…. But I am most fearfully unhappy. That is all. I am so unhappy that I wish I was dead—yet I should be mad to die when I have not yet lived at all.

I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing (Though I may write about cabmen. That’s no matter.) But warm, eager, living life — to be rooted in life — to learn, to desire, to feel, to think, to act. This is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for.