Olive Schreiner
Olive Schreiner
Olive Schreinerwas a South African author, anti-war campaigner and intellectual. She is best remembered today for her novel The Story of an African Farm which has been highly acclaimed since its first publication in 1883 for the bold manner in which it deals with some of the burning issues of the day, including agnosticism, existential independence, individualism, the professional aspirations of women, and the elemental nature of life on the colonial frontier. In more recent studies she has also been...
NationalitySouth African
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth24 March 1855
[Finishing schools] are nicely adapted machines for experimenting on the question, "Into how little space a human being can be crushed?" I have seen some souls so compressed that they would have fitted into a small thimble, and found room to move . . .
There's something so beautiful in coming on one's very inmost thoughts in another. In one way it is one of the greatest pleasures one has.
I am always thirsting for beautiful, beautiful, beautiful music. I wish I could make it. Perhaps there isn't any music on earth like what I picture to myself.
The nations which have received and in any way dealt fairly and mercifully with the Jew have prospered, and the nations that have tortured and oppressed him have written out their own curse.
No good work is ever done while the heart is hot and anxious and fretted.
How hard it is to make your thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink on paper.
Power! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other souls should have power or not? It is born in them. You may dam up the fountain of water, and make it a stagnant marsh, or you may let it run free and do its work; but you cannot say whether it shall be there; it is there. And it will act, if not openly for good, then covertly for evil; but it will act.
There's something beautiful about finding one's innermost thoughts in another.
They are called finishing-schools and the name tells accurately what they are. They finish everything.
If Nature here wishes to make a mountain, she runs a range for five hundred miles; if a plain, she levels eighty; if a rock, she tilts five thousand feet of strata on end; our skies are higher and more intensely blue; our waves larger than others; our rivers fiercer. There is nothing measured, small nor petty in South Africa.
Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist.
Ones real deathless wealth is all the beautiful souls one has seen and spiritually touched.
I know there will be spring, as surely as the birds know it when they see above the snow two tiny, quivering green leaves. Spring cannot fail us.
genius has no limit of sex or race.