Katherine Mansfield

“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.”

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

“The mind I love must have wild places.”

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

“Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy.”

“To be alive and to be a ‘writer’ is enough.”

“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.”

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

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

“By carving my initials on the back of my hand, I am determined to make my mark.”

“I adore to be quiet and alone.”

“I have a perfect horror of words that are not backed up by deeds.”

“Ah, what is it? - that I heard my own soul saying - to be in love, and at the same time to be alone.”

“The desire to write is the desire to live.”

“When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me!”

“I'm a writer first and a woman after.”

“It is the secret of life that we are always seeking for it.”

“What is it with me? Am I absolutely nobody, but merely inordinately vain?”