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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
Unhappy
Merely
Absolutely
Lived
Nobody
Inordinately
Dead
Fearfully
Dies
Mad
Wish
Vain

More quotes by Katherine Mansfield

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Winter is a terrible time for thin people - terrible! Why should it hound them down, fasten on them, worry them so? Why not, for a change, take a nip, take a snap at the fat ones who wouldn't notice? But no! It is sleek, warm, cat-like summer that makes the fat one's life a misery. Winter is all for bones.
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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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
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we cling to our last pleasures as the tree clings to its last leaves.
Katherine Mansfield
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I feel I must live alone, alone, alone - with artists only to touch the door. Every artist cuts off his ear and nails it on the outside of the door for the others to shout into.
Katherine Mansfield
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I love the night. I love to feel the tide of darkness rising, slowly and slowly washing, turning over and over, lifting, floating, all that lies strewn upon the dark beach, all that lies hid in rocky hollows.
Katherine Mansfield
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England is merely an island of beef swimming in a warm gulf stream of gravy.
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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Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.
Katherine Mansfield
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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
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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
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It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves.
Katherine Mansfield
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Yes, my mother's death is a terrible sorrow to me. I feel - do you know what I mean - the silence of it so. She was more alive than anyone I have ever known.
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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Do you remember your childhood? I am always coming across these marvelous accounts by writers who declare that they remember 'everything.' I certainly don't. The dark stretches, the blanks, are much bigger than the bright glimpses. I seem to have spent most of my time like a plant in a cupboard.
Katherine Mansfield
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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 plusses.
Katherine Mansfield
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The truth is friendship is every bit as sacred and eternal as marriage.
Katherine Mansfield
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Regret is an appalling waste of time.
Katherine Mansfield
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Some couples go over their budgets very carefully every month. Others just go over them.
Katherine Mansfield
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How idiotic civilization is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?
Katherine Mansfield