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What is it with me? Am I absolutely nobody, but merely inordinately vain? I do not know…. But I am most fearfully unhappy. That is all. I am so unhappy that I wish I was dead—yet I should be mad to die when I have not yet lived at all.

Katherine Mansfield

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Katherine Mansfield
Age: 34 †
Born: 1888
Born: October 14
Died: 1923
Died: January 9
Diarist
Poet
Writer
Wellington
New Zealand
Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry
Kathleen Murry
Katherine Beauchamp Mansfield
Kathleen Mansfield Murry
Dies
Mad
Wish
Vain
Unhappy
Merely
Absolutely
Lived
Nobody
Inordinately
Dead
Fearfully

More quotes by Katherine Mansfield

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Life never become a habit to me. It's always a marvel.
Katherine Mansfield
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It's a terrible thing to be alone - yes it is - it is - but don't lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath - as terrible as you like - but a mask.
Katherine Mansfield
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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.
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if one really does try to find out why it is that people don't leave each other, one discovers a mystery. It is because they can't they are bound. And nobody on earth knows what are the bonds that bind them except those two.
Katherine Mansfield
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The truth is that every true admirer of the novels cherishes the happy thought that he alone - reading between the lines - has bcome the secret friend of their author.
Katherine Mansfield
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That's all life is - something childish and very natural. Isn't it?
Katherine Mansfield
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In the shortest sea voyage there is no sense of time. You have been down in the cabin for hours or days or years. Nobody knows or cares. You know all the people to the point of indifference. You do not believe in dry land any more - you are caught in the pendulum itself, and left there, idly swinging.
Katherine Mansfield
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... I'd always rather be with people who loved me too little rather than with people who loved me too much.
Katherine Mansfield
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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
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Do the hardest thing on earth for you. ACT YOURSELF.
Katherine Mansfield
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To be alive and to be a ‘writer’ is enough.
Katherine Mansfield
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Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.
Katherine Mansfield
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You might drop your heart into me and you'd never hear it touch bottom.
Katherine Mansfield
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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
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If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools.
Katherine Mansfield
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There is no feeling to be compared with the feeling of having written and finished a story.
Katherine Mansfield
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Wind moving through grass so that the grass quivers. This moves me with an emotion I don't even understand.
Katherine Mansfield
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we cling to our last pleasures as the tree clings to its last leaves.
Katherine Mansfield
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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
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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.
Katherine Mansfield