Quote

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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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
Left
Sea
Swinging
Care
Travel
Shortest
Believe
Nobody
Voyage
Years
Land
Voyages
Idly
Time
Days
Dry
Pendulums
People
Hours
Cares
Pendulum
Point
Indifference
Cabin
Sense
Caught
Cabins

More quotes by Katherine Mansfield

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The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.
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I saw myself driving through Eternity in a timeless taxi.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.... This all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, it's no longer so. I feel happy- deep down. All is well.
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The late evening is the time of times. Then with that unearthly beauty before one it is not hard to realise how far one has to go. To write something that will be worthy of that rising moon, that pale light.
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It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves.
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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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You might drop your heart into me and you'd never hear it touch bottom.
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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If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools.
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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Oh, how quickly things changed! Why didn't happiness last for ever? For ever wasn't a bit too long.
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My love for you tonight is so deep and tender that it seems to be outside myself as well.
Katherine Mansfield
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I'm a writer first and a woman after.
Katherine Mansfield
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Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different.
Katherine Mansfield
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To long for everything: sorrow to accept everything: joy.
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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.
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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