Quotes from Katherine Mansfield

Make it a rule of life never to regret and never look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can't build on it; it's good only for wallowing in.

Risk! Risk anything! ... Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.

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

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 — little rags and shreds of your very life.

No, no, the mind I love must still 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 (real snakes), a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of — and paths threaded with those little flowers planted by the mind. It must also have real hiding places, not artificial ones — not gazebos and mazes. And I have never yet met the cultivated mind that has not had its shrubbery.

But a queer thing is — this is personal — however painful a thing has been when I look back it is no longer painful, or no more painful than music is. In fact it is just that.

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

To work - to work! It is such infinite delight to know that we still have the best things to do.

I don't believe other people are ever as foolishly excited as I am while I'm working. How could they be? Writers would have to live in trees.

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.

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

I'm treating you as a friend asking you to share my present minuses in the hope that I can ask you to share my future pluses

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

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

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.

Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. That is the mystery.

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

England is merely an island of beef swimming in a warm gulf stream of gravy.

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.

I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella.

The more you are motivated by love, the more fearless and free your actions will be.

If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools

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