"Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others ... Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth."(Journal entry, 14 October 1922)"
- Katherine Mansfield
"A big bee, a golden furry fellow, crept into a freesia, and the delicate flower leaned over, swung, shook; and when the bee flew away it fluttered still as though it were laughing. Happy, careless flo..."
"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."
"I can never be perfectly certain whether Helen was got with child by Leonard Bast or by his fatal forgotten umbrella. All things considered, I think it must have been the umbrella."
"To acknowledge the presence of fear is to give birth to failure."
"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."
"I do not know why I have such a fancy for this little café. It's dirty and sad, sad. It's not as if it had anything to distinguish it from a hundred others–it hasn't; or as if the same strange types c..."
"I thought how true it was that the world was a delightful place if it were not for the people, and how more than true it was that people were not worth troubling about, and that wise men should set th..."
"Everything about her was sweet, pale like honey. You would not have been surprised to see a bee caught in the tangles of that yellow hair."
"Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. That is the mystery."