How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you — you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences — like rags and shreds of your very life.

Mansfield frames departure not as a clean break but as a kind of emotional abrasion: places “hold” you, and leaving means being snagged by memory, habit, and attachment. The image of “little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences” suggests that identity is partly deposited in the environments we inhabit—rooms, streets, routines, and relationships—so that moving on entails loss as well as liberation. The simile “like rags and shreds of your very life” intensifies the sense that experience is materially woven into us; to escape is to tear. The quote captures a modernist preoccupation with fragmentation and the lingering afterlife of lived spaces.