Olive Schreiner

Olive Schreiner (24 March 1855 – 11 December 1920) was a South African author, anti-war campaigner and intellectual.

Olive Schreiner (1889)

Quotes

The Story of an African Farm (1883)

• The full African moon poured down its light from the blue sky into the wide, lonely plain. The dry, sandy earth, with its coating of stunted ‘karroo’ bushes a few inches high, the low hills that skirted the plain, the milk-bushes with their long, finger-like leaves, all were touched by a weird and almost oppressive beauty as they lay in the white light.”
  • Part 1, Chapter 1, Page 35; The opening of the novel devotes considerable attention to the setting, which will influence the development of the characters and the movement of the plot.

• And you do not need to. When you are seventeen this Boer-woman will go; you will have this farm and everything that is upon it for your own; but I,’ said Lyndall, ‘will have nothing. I must learn.’”
  • Part 1, Chapter 2, Page 46; Lyndall tells Em why she must have an education: She stands to inherit nothing, and she wishes to be independent.

• Very tenderly the old man looked at him. He saw not the bloated body nor the evil face of the man; but, as it were, under deep disguise and fleshly concealment, the form that long years of dreaming had made very real to him.
  • Part 1, Chapter 3, Pages 56-57; Otto gazes upon the sleeping form of Bonaparte Blenkins, who has shown up at the farm worse for wear.

• We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.

• This dirty little world full of confusion, and the blue rag, stretched overhead for a sky, is so low we could touch it with our hand.

• Marriage for love is the beautifulest external symbol of the union of souls, marriage without it is the uncleanliest traffic that defiles the world.

• Men are like the earth and we are the moon; we turn always one side to them, and they think there is no other, because they don't see it—but there is.
• "What need had he of experience? Experience teaches us in a millennium what passion teaches us in an hour."
  • This quote attests to the importance of emotion in guiding life.
• "And so, it comes to pass in time, that the earth ceases for us to be a weltering chaos. We walk in the great hall of life, looking up and round reverentially. Nothing is despicable—all is meaning-full; nothing is small—all is part of a whole, whose beginning and end we know not. The life that throbs in us is a beginning and end we know not. The life that throbs in us is a pulsation from it; too mighty for our comprehension, not too small. And so, it comes to pass at last, that whereas the sky was at first a small blue rag stretched out over us, and so low that our hands might touch it, pressing down on us, it raises itself into an immeasurable blue arch over our heads, and we begin to live again."
  • This quote occurs at the end of the short section “Times and Seasons”, which outlines in quick strokes the development and growth of the child’s religious faith and the disillusion that occurs as the child grows older. It ends with the discovery of order in nature, a realization that brings spiritual renewal into a universalist faith system, in which nothing is despicable.
• "And she said, in a voice strangely unlike her own: “I see the vision of a poor, weak soul striving after good. It was not cut short, and in the end it learnt, through tears and much pain, that holiness is an infinite compassion for others; that greatness is to take the common things of life and walk truly among them; that”—She moved her white hand and laid it on her forehead—“happiness is a great love and much serving. It was not cut short; and it loved what it had learnt—it loved—and—”
  • This quote sums up what Lyndall has learned on her life journey.
• “All things on earth have their price, and for truth we pay the dearest. We barter it for love and sympathy. The road to honour is paved with thorns; but on the path to truth, at every step you set your foot down on your heart.”
• “Experience teaches us in a millennium what passion teaches us in an hour.”
• “[O]nly the sea is like a human being . . .always moving, always something deep in itself is stirring it. It never rests; it is always wanting, wanting, wanting. It hurries on; and then it creeps back slowly without having reached, moaning. It is always asking a question and it never gets the answer.”
• “When the curtain falls no one is ready”
• “Men are like the earth and we are the moon; we turn always one side to them, and they think there is no other, because they don't see it—but there is.”
• “I am not in so great a hurry to put my neck beneath any man's foot; and I do not so greatly admire the crying of babies”
• “Marriage for love is the beautifulest external symbol of the union of souls, marriage without it is the uncleanliest traffic that defiles the world.”
• “If the bird does like its cage, and does like its sugar and will not leave it, why keep the door so very carefully shut?”
• “This dirty little world full of confusion, and the blue rag, stretched overhead for a sky, is so low we could touch it with our hand.”
• “The bees are very attentive to the flowers until their honey is done, and then they fly over them. I don't know if the flowers feel grateful to the bees, they are great fools if they do.”
• “There are some of us who in after years say to Fate, 'Now deal us your hardest blow, give us what you will; but let us never again suffer as we suffered when we were children.' The barb in the arrow of childhood's suffering is this: its intense loneliness, its intense ignorance.”
• “So age succeeds age, and dream succeeds dream, and of the joy of the dreamer no man knoweth but he who dreameth.

Our fathers had their dreams; we have ours; the generation that follows will have its own. Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist.”

• “I am a man who believes nothing, hopes nothing, fears nothing, feels nothing. I am beyond the pale of humanity [...]”
• “The meanest girl who dances and dresses becomes something higher when her children look up into her face and ask her questions. It is the only education we have and which they cannot take from us”
• “I think,' said Lyndall, 'that he is like a thorn-tree, which grows up very quietly, without any one's caring for it, and one day suddenly breaks out into yellow blossoms.”
• “why am I so alone, so hard, so cold? I am so weary of myself! It is eating my soul to its core,--self, self, self! I cannot bear this life! I cannot breathe, I cannot live! Will nothing free me from myself?' She pressed her cheek agains the wooden post. 'I want to love! I want something great and pure to lift me to itself! Dear old man, I cannot bear it any more! I am so cold, so hard, so hard; will no one help me!”
• “I have discovered that of all cursed places under the sun, where the hungriest soul can hardly pick up a few grains of knowledge, a girls' boarding-school is the worst. They are called finishing schools, and the name tells accurately what they are. They finish everything but imbecility and weakness, and that they cultivate.”
• “Why hate, and struggle, and fight? Let is be as it would.”
• “For a little sould that cries oout aloud for continued personal existence for itseld and its beloved, there is no help. For the sould which know itself no more as a unit, but as part of the Universal Unit of which the Beloved also is part; which feels within itself the throb of the Universal Life; for that soul there is not death.”
• “I have sought,” he said, “for long years I have laboured; but I have not found her. I have not rested, I have not repined, and I have not seen her; now my strength is gone. Where I lie down worn out other men will stand, young and fresh. By the steps that I have cut they will climb; by the stairs that I have built they will mount. They will never know the name of the man who made them. At the clumsy work they will laugh; when the stones roll they will curse me. But they will mount, and on my work; they will climb, and by my stair! They will find her, and through me! And no man liveth to himself and no man dieth to himself.”
• “On the path to truth, at every step, you set your foot down on your own heart.”

Quotes about Olive Schreine

• When Olive Schreiner, aged seventeen, wrote the South African Farm, some among her friends were disappointed she had not called more upon her imagination and described wild and thrilling adventures, as her country might have suggested. "Such works," she says in her Preface to this wonderful book, "are best written in Piccadilly or the Strand; there the gifts of creative imagination, untrammelled by contact with fact, may spread their wings. Those brilliant phases and shapes are not for her to portray. Sadly she must squeeze the colour from her brush. She must paint what lies before her."
  • Mary Drew - Foreword ("Men I Have Painted" - John McLure Hamilton)

• The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner is often thought of as being the beginning of South African literature. She stood more or less alone.
  • 1970 interview in Conversations with Nadine Gordimer edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990)

External links

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