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Perhaps the old monks were right when they tried to root love out perhaps the poets are right when they try to water it. It is a blood-red flower, with the color of sin but there is always the scent of a god about it.

Olive Schreiner

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Olive Schreiner
Age: 65 †
Born: 1855
Born: March 24
Died: 1920
Died: December 11
Author
Writer
Cape of Good Hope
Olive Emily Albertina Schreiner
Ralph Iron
Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner
Water
Roots
Right
Tried
Trying
Sin
Monks
Always
Flower
Monk
Love
Poet
Scent
Perhaps
Root
Color
Poets
Blood
Red

More quotes by Olive Schreiner

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The secret of success is concentration ... Taste everything a little, look at everything a little but live for one thing.
Olive Schreiner
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Now we have no God. We have had two: the old God that our fathers handed down to us, that we hated, and never liked the new one that we made for ourselves, that we loved but now he has flitted away from us, and we see what he was made of - the shadow of our highest ideal, crowned and throned. Now we have no God.
Olive Schreiner
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It is the swimmer who first leaps into the frozen stream who is cut sharpest by the ice those who follow him find it broken, and the last find it gone. It is the men or women who first tread down the path which the bulk of humanity will ultimately follow, who must find themselves at last in solitudes where the silence is deadly.
Olive Schreiner
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I think if I were dying and I heard of an act of injustice, it would start me up to a moment's life again.
Olive Schreiner
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There are only two things that are absolute realities, love and knowledge, and you can't escape them.
Olive Schreiner
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[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 . . .
Olive Schreiner
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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.
Olive Schreiner
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Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist.
Olive Schreiner
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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.
Olive Schreiner
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How hard it is to make your thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink on paper.
Olive Schreiner
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A child sees everything, looks straight at it, examines it, without any preconceived idea most people, after they are about eleven or twelve, quite lose this power, they see everything through a few preconceived ideas which hang like a veil between them and the outer world.
Olive Schreiner
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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.
Olive Schreiner
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When the curtain falls no one is ready
Olive Schreiner
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Our fathers had their dreams we have ours the generation that follows will have its own. Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist.
Olive Schreiner
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No woman who is a woman says of a human body, 'it is nothing' ... On this one point, and on this point alone, the knowledge of woman, simply as woman, is superior to that of man she knows the history of human flesh she knows its cost he does not.
Olive Schreiner
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We have always borne part of the weight of war, and the major part ... Men have made boomerangs, bows, swords, or guns with which to destroy one another we have made the men who destroyed and were destroyed! ... We pay the first cost on all human life.
Olive Schreiner
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To us, from the beginning, Nature has been but a poor plastic thing, to be toyed with this way or that, as man happens to please his deity or not to go to church or not to say his prayers right or not to travel on a Sunday or not.Was it possible for us in an instant to see Nature as she is-the flowing vestment of an unchanging reality?
Olive Schreiner
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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.
Olive Schreiner
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We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.
Olive Schreiner
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There's something beautiful about finding one's innermost thoughts in another.
Olive Schreiner