“It seemed his life had been but a magnified day. Behind him days stretched by repetition into years and years, by a monotony of hours, habits, and repeated acts, dwindled once more to a day.”
—olive moore, fugue (1932), p.79.
July 2010
22 posts
katherine mansfield society →
katherinemansfieldsociety.org
An ‘international organisation […] set up to promote and encourage the worldwide study and enjoyment of Katherine Mansfield’s writing.’
“My life, which seems so simple and monotonous, is really a complicated affair of cafés where they like me and cafés where they don’t, streets that are friendly, streets that aren’t, rooms where I might be happy, rooms where I never shall be, looking-glasses I look nice in, looking-glasses I don’t, dresses that will be lucky, dresses that won’t, and so on.”
—jean rhys, good morning, midnight (1939), p.40.
“She turned over to the wall and idly, with one finger, she traced a poppy on the wall-paper with a leaf and a stem and a fat bursting bud. In the quiet, and under her tracing finger, the poppy seemed to come alive. She could feel the sticky, silky petals, the stem, hairy like a gooseberry skin, the rough leaf and the tight glazed bud. Things had a habit of coming alive like that.”
—katherine mansfield, ‘prelude’ in bliss and other stories (1920).
“It was one of those days when you can see the ghosts of all the other lovely days. You drink a bit and watch the ghosts of all the lovely days that have ever been from behind a glass.”
—jean rhys, voyage in the dark (1934), p.122.
“To be alone, sick, in London in this dry, sterile, burnt-out end of summer, was to be abandoned in a pestilence stricken town; was to live in a third-class waiting-room at a disused terminus among stains and smells, odds and ends of refuse and decay. She sank down and existed, without light, in the waste land.”
—rosamond lehmann, the weather in the streets (1936), p.263.
“She had those eyes that seemed to be welcome nowhere, that learn shyness from the alarm they precipitate. Such eyes are always turning away or being humbly lowered - they dare come to rest nowhere but on a point in space; their homeless intent makes them appear fanatical. They may move, they may affront, but they cannot communicate. You most often meet or, rather, avoid meeting such eyes in a child’s face - what becomes of the child later you do not know.”
—elizabeth bowen, the death of the heart (1938), p.49.
guardian books blog poem of the week →
guardian.co.uk
mansfield’s ‘the candle’ makes poem of the week on the guardian’s books blog..
“But what are stories? Toys I twist, bubbles I blow, one ring passing through another.”
—virginia woolf, the waves (1931), p.118.
