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?

Katherine Mansfield

Categorized in : Feelings Overcoming Pieces

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

Katherine Mansfield

inspirational friendship life

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.

Katherine Mansfield

motivational happiness inspirational

My love for you tonight is so deep and tender that it seems to be outside myself as well.

Katherine Mansfield

my-love-for-you greatest-love tonight

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.

Katherine Mansfield

rags fence littles

By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love - the earth and the wonders thereof - the sea - the sun, all that we mean when we speak of the external world. I want to enter into it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious, direct human being. I want, by understanding myself, to understand others.

Katherine Mansfield

breathing sea mean

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.

Katherine Mansfield

wisdom positive inspirational

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.

Katherine Mansfield

stars dark writing

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

Katherine Mansfield

light age years

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 promise

Katherine Mansfield

love promise world

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

Katherine Mansfield

best-friend love friendship

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.

Katherine Mansfield

stupidity body giving

No, no the mind I love must still have wild places - a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown litde wood, the chance of a snake or two (real snakes), a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with those litde flowers planted by the wind.

Katherine Mansfield

flower dream love

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.

Katherine Mansfield

nice strong thinking

What happiness it is to listen to rain at night; joyful relief, ease; a lapping-round and hushing and brooding tenderness, all are mingled together in the sound of the fast-falling rain. God, looking down upon the rainy earth, sees how faint are these lights shining in little windows, - how easily put out.

Katherine Mansfield

rain night fall

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

Katherine Mansfield

literacy reading book

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

Katherine Mansfield

life-moves-on regret looks

When we begin to take our failures non-seriously, it means we are ceasing to be afraid of them.

Katherine Mansfield

success-and-failure failure mean

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

Katherine Mansfield

truth-is sacred friendship

September is different from all other months. It is more magical. I feel the strange chemical change in the earth which produces mushrooms is the cause, too, of the extra 'life' in the air - a resilience, a sparkle.

Katherine Mansfield

resilience mushrooms air

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

Katherine Mansfield

toadstools mushrooms love