Читать книгу Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles) - Katherine Mansfield - Страница 55

“I am that which is.”

“No mortal man dare lift the veil.”

“He is alone of himself; to him alone do all men owe their being.” — Religion Of Beethoven; August, 1805.

“Realise your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days listening to the tedious — trying to improve the hopeless failure — or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common or the vulgar — which are the aims, the false ideals of our Age. Live! Live the wonderful life which is in you. Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always reaching…. Be afraid of nothing.” — O.W.

“Ambition is a curse if you are not … proof against everything else, unless you are willing to sacrifice yourself to your ambition.” — A Woman (K.M.).

“It cannot be possible to go through all the abandonment of music and care humanly for anything human afterward.” — A Woman.

“All musicians, no matter how insignificant, come to life emancipated of their power to take life seriously. It is not one man or woman but the complete octave of sex that they desire.” — A.W.

“You feel helpless under the yoke of creation.” — A.W.

“Nature makes such fools of us! What is the use of liking anyone if the washerwoman can do exactly the same thing? Well, this is Nature’s trick to ensure population.” — A.W.

“Most women turn to salt, looking back.” — A.W.

“Big people have always entirely followed their own inclinations. Why should we remember the names of people who do what everyone does? To (be in) love with success is to be illustrious.” — A.W.

“I do not want to earn a living; I want to live.” — O.W.

“You inspect yourself from the heights of an inspiration and rebound in sickening jolts from pinnacles to the mud on the street.” — A.W.

“A woman really cannot understand music till she has the actual experience of those laboriously con- cealed things which are evidently the foundation of them all.” — A.W. (K.M.)

“The translation of an emotion into act is its death — its logical end…. But … this way isn’t the act of unlawful things. It is the curiosity of our own temperament, the delicate expression of our own tendencies, the welding into an Art of act or incident some raw emotion of the blood. For we castrate our minds to the extent by which we deny our bodies.” — O.W.

March 20, 1907. Selections from Dorian Gray

“Being natural is simply a pose — and the most irritating pose I know…. I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.”

“The worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.”

“Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love; it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.”

“No influence is immoral — immoral from the scientific point of view. Nothing can cure the soul but the senses — just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.” — O.W.