Quotes from Katherine Mansfield

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.

Short stories can be like photographs, catching people at some moment in their lives and trapping the memory for ever . There they are, smiling or frowning, looking sad, happy, serious, surprised ... And behind those smiles and those frowns lie all the experience of life, the fears and delights, the hopes and the dreams

I believe that people are like portmanteaux - packed with certain things, started going, thrown about, tossed away, dumped down, lost and found, half emptied suddenly, or squeezed fatter than ever, until finally the Ultimate Porter swings them on to the Ultimate Train and away they rattle...

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.

Love! Love! Your tenderness, Your beautiful, watchful ways

We are solitary creatures au fond. It hapens so rarely that one feels another understands. But when one does feel it, it's not only a joy, it's a help and comfort in dark moments.

This [Ulysses] is obviously the wave of the future, I'm glad I'm dying of tuberculosis.

Do you feel in this letter my love for you today - It is as warm as a bird's nest.

Don't forget that dragons are only guardians of treasures and one fights them for what they keep - not for themselves...

but that is the satisfaction of writing - one can impersonate so many people.

The ostrich burying its head in the sand does at any rate wish to convey the impression that its head is the most important part of it.

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.

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.

Oh,' said the little girl, 'my head's on your heart; I can hear it going. What a big heart you've got, father dear.

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.

I am always conscious of this secret disruption in me

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!

I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.

The lights, the azaleas, the dresses, the pink faces, the velvet chairs, all became one beautiful flying wheel.

He would sit very still on the doorstep And dream--O, that he had a friend! Somebody to come when he called them, Somebody to catch by the hand, Somebody to sleep with at night time, Somebody who'd quite understand.

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.

What did garden-parties and baskets and lace frocks matter to him? He was far from all those things. He was wonderful, beautiful.

Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at - nothing - at nothing, simply.

Dark girls, fair girls were patting their hair, tying ribbons again, tucking handkerchiefs down the fronts of their bodices, smoothing marble-white gloves. And because they were all laughing it seemed to Leila that they were all lovely.