I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.
- Katherine Mansfield Rate and Discuss this quote

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 Rate and Discuss this quote

If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools. With mushrooms it is so simple — you salt them well, put them aside and have patience. But with love, you have no sooner lighted on anything that bears even the remotest resemblance to it than you are perfectly certain it is not only a genuine specimen, but perhaps the only genuine mushroom ungathered.
- Katherine Mansfield Rate and Discuss this quote

Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different. Life would undergo a change of appearance because we ourselves had undergone a change of attitude.
- Katherine Mansfield Rate and Discuss this quote

Were we positive, eager, real — alive? No, we were not. We were a nothingness shot with gleams of what might be.
- Katherine Mansfield Rate and Discuss this quote

When we can begin to take our failures nonseriously, it means we are ceasing to be afraid of them. It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves.
- Katherine Mansfield Rate and Discuss this quote

The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.
- Katherine Mansfield Rate and Discuss this quote

Would you not like to try all sorts of lives — one is so very small — but that is the satisfaction of writing — one can impersonate so many people.
- Katherine Mansfield Rate and Discuss this quote

Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. This is the mystery. This is what I must do.
- Katherine Mansfield Rate and Discuss this quote

By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love — the earth and the wonders thereof — the sea — the sun, all that we mean when we speak of the external world. I want to enter into it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious, direct human being. I want, by understanding myself, to understand others.
- Katherine Mansfield Rate and Discuss this quote

Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order. This is what life has taught me.
- Katherine Mansfield Rate and Discuss this quote

Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.
- Katherine Mansfield Rate and Discuss this quote

To work — to work! It is such infinite delight to know that we still have the best things to do.
- Katherine Mansfield Rate and Discuss this quote

To acknowledge the presence of fear is to give birth to failure.
- Katherine Mansfield Rate and Discuss this quote