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

— Katherine Mansfield

I am treating you as my friend asking you to share my present minuses in the hope I can ask you to share my future pluses.

— Katherine Mansfield

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 pluses.

— Katherine Mansfield

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.

— Katherine Mansfield

I do not know why I have such a fancy for this little café. It's dirty and sad, sad. It's not as if it had anything to distinguish it from a hundred others–it hasn't; or as if the same strange types came here every day, whom one could watch from one's corner and recognize and more or less (with a strong accent on the less) get the hang of. But pray don't imagine that those brackets are a confession of my humility before the mystery of the human soul. Not at all; I don't believe in the human soul. I never have. I believe that people are like portmanteau–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

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 Died! How quiet and how patient!

— Katherine Mansfield

I saw myself driving through Eternity in a timeless taxi.

— Katherine Mansfield

Isn't life,' she stammered, 'isn't life--' But what life was she couldn't explain. No matter. He quite understood.' Isn't it, darling?' said Laurie.

— Katherine Mansfield

I sometimes wonder whether the act of surrender is not one of the greatest of all - the highest. It is one of the [most] difficult of all... You see it's so immensely complicated. It needs real humility and at the same time, an absolute belief in one's own essential freedom. It is an act of faith. At the last moments, like all great acts, it is pure risk. This is true for me as a human being and as a writer. Dear Heaven, how hard it is to let go - to step into the blue. And yet one's creative life depends on it and one desires to do nothing else.

— Katherine Mansfield

I thought how true it was that the world was a delightful place if it were not for the people, and how more than true it was that people were not worth troubling about, and that wise men should set their affections upon nothing smaller than cities, heavenly or otherwise, and countrysides which are always heavenly.

— Katherine Mansfield