Complete Works of Katherine Mansfield Quotes

“All the same, without being morbid, and giving way to—to memories and so on, I must confess that there does seem to me something sad in life. It is hard to say what it is. I don’t mean the sorrow that we all know, like illness and poverty and death. No, it is something different. It is there, deep down, deep down, part of one, like one’s breathing. However hard I work and tire myself I have only to stop to know it is there, waiting. I often wonder if everybody feels the same. One can never know. But isn’t it extraordinary that under his sweet, joyful little singing it was just this—sadness?—Ah, what is it?—that I heard.”
― Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Mansfield: The Complete Collection

“Not at all; I don’t believe in the human soul. I never have. 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.…”
― Katherine Mansfield, The Katherine Mansfield MEGAPACK ®: 101 Classic Works

“Oh, Alice was wild. She wasn’t one to mind being told, but there was something in the way Miss Beryl had of speaking to her that she couldn’t stand. Oh, that she couldn’t. It made her curl up inside, as you might say, and she fair trembled. But what Alice really hated Miss Beryl for was that she made her feel low. She talked to Alice in a special voice as though she wasn’t quite all there; and she never lost her temper with her—never. Even when Alice dropped anything or forgot anything important Miss Beryl seemed to have expected it to happen.”
― Katherine Mansfield, The Katherine Mansfield MEGAPACK ®: 101 Classic Works

“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, The Katherine Mansfield MEGAPACK ®: 101 Classic Works

“As she stood there, the day flickered out and dark came. With the dark crept the wind snuffling and howling. The windows of the empty house shook, a creaking came from the walls and floors, a piece of loose iron on the roof banged forlornly. Kezia was suddenly quite, quite still, with wide open eyes and knees pressed together. She was frightened. She wanted to call Lottie and to go on calling all the while she ran downstairs and out of the house. But it was just behind her, waiting at the door, at the head of the stairs, at the bottom of the stairs, hiding in the passage, ready to dart out at the back door.”
― Katherine Mansfield, The Katherine Mansfield MEGAPACK ®: 101 Classic Works

“And suddenly she raised her muff as though her hands were clasped inside it, and she was telling the pale, sweaty garçon by that action that she was at the end of her resources, that she cried out to him to save her with “Tea. Immediately!” * * * * This seemed to me so amazingly in the picture, so exactly the gesture and cry that one would expect (though I couldn’t have imagined it) to be wrung out of an Englishwoman faced with a great crisis,”
― Katherine Mansfield, The Katherine Mansfield MEGAPACK ®: 101 Classic Works

“And when she turned to me and handed me the keys (the garçon was hauling up the boxes) and said: “Monsieur Duquette will show you your rooms”—I had a longing to tap Dick on the arm with a key and say, very confidentially: “Look here, old chap. As a friend of mine I’ll be only too willing to make a slight reduction…” Up and up we climbed. Round and round. Past an occasional pair of boots (why is it one never sees an attractive pair of boots outside a door?). Higher and higher.”
― Katherine Mansfield, The Katherine Mansfield MEGAPACK ®: 101 Classic Works

“I hate whisky. Every time I take it into my mouth my stomach rises against it, and the stuff they keep here is sure to be particularly vile. I only ordered it because I am going to write about an Englishman. We French are incredibly old-fashioned and out of date still in some ways.”
― Katherine Mansfield, The Katherine Mansfield MEGAPACK ®: 101 Classic Works

“And besides, I’ve no patience with people who can’t let go of things, who will follow after and cry out. When a thing’s gone, it’s gone. It’s over and done with. Let it go then! Ignore it, and comfort yourself, if you do want comforting, with the thought that you never do recover the same thing that you lose. It’s always a new thing.”
― Katherine Mansfield, The Katherine Mansfield MEGAPACK ®: 101 Classic Works

“When she is not serving she sits on a stool with her face turned, always, to the window. Her dark-ringed eyes search among and follow after the people passing, but not as if she was looking for somebody. Perhaps, fifteen years ago, she was; but now the pose has become a habit. You can tell from her air of fatigue and hopelessness that she must have given them up for the last ten years, at least.…”
― Katherine Mansfield, The Katherine Mansfield MEGAPACK ®: 101 Classic Works

“Alice was a mild creature in reality, but she had the most marvellous retorts ready for questions that she knew would never be put to her. The composing of them and the turning of them over and over in her mind comforted her just as much as if they’d been expressed.”
― Katherine Mansfield, The Katherine Mansfield MEGAPACK ®: 101 Classic Works

“Oh, mother, really you need not dust them. It would take years to dust all those little holes.” And she frowned at the top of her mother’s head and bit her lip with impatience. Mother’s deliberate way of doing things was simply maddening. It was old age, she supposed, loftily.”
― Katherine Mansfield, The Katherine Mansfield MEGAPACK ®: 101 Classic Works

“THEY knew how frightened she was; THEY saw how she turned her head away as she passed the mirror. What Linda always felt was that THEY wanted something of her, and she knew that if she gave herself up and was quiet, more than quiet, silent, motionless, something would really happen.”
― Katherine Mansfield, The Katherine Mansfield MEGAPACK ®: 101 Classic Works

“Through a square hall filled with bales and hundreds of parrots (but the parrots were only on the wall-paper) down a narrow passage where the parrots persisted in flying past Kezia with her lamp.”
― Katherine Mansfield, The Katherine Mansfield MEGAPACK ®: 101 Classic Works

“But Lottie staggered on the lowest verandah step like a bird fallen out of the nest. If she stood still for a moment she fell asleep, if she leaned against anything her eyes closed. She could not walk another step.”
― Katherine Mansfield, The Katherine Mansfield MEGAPACK ®: 101 Classic Works

“Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry (1888–1923) was a prominent modernist writer of short fiction who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. When she was 19, Mansfield left New Zealand and settled in the United Kingdom, where she became a friend of modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. During the First World War, she contracted extrapulmonary tuberculosis, which led to her death at the age of 34.”
― Katherine Mansfield, The Katherine Mansfield MEGAPACK ®: 101 Classic Works