Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Never
Ignorance
Suffered
Deal
Loneliness
Deals
Intense
Suffering
Suffer
Give
Hardest
Barb
Giving
Blow
Barbs
Children
Fate
Arrow
Years
Childhood
Arrows

More quotes by Olive Schreiner

Image
The surest sign of fitness is success.
Olive Schreiner
Image
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
Image
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.
Olive Schreiner
Image
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
Image
God said, 'When one man and one woman shine together, it makes the most perfect light.
Olive Schreiner
Image
Marriage for love is the most beautiful external symbol of the union of souls marriage without it is the least clean traffic that defiles the world.
Olive Schreiner
Image
[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
Image
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?
Olive Schreiner
Image
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.
Olive Schreiner
Image
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
Image
No woman has the right to marry a man if she has to bend herself out of shape for him. She might wish to, but she could never be to him with all her passionate endeavor what the other woman could be to him without trying. Character will dominate over all and will come out at last.
Olive Schreiner
Image
Love that has been given to you is too sacred a thing to be talked of to anyone ... except just to the person who is like part of you and who will feel it as you do.
Olive Schreiner
Image
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
Image
The secret of success is concentration ... Taste everything a little, look at everything a little but live for one thing.
Olive Schreiner
Image
How hard it is to make your thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink on paper.
Olive Schreiner
Image
Soul, what have I to do with you?
Olive Schreiner
Image
A word may become so defiled by bad use that it will take a century before it can be purifed, and brought into use again.
Olive Schreiner
Image
There are only two things that are absolute realities, love and knowledge, and you can't escape them.
Olive Schreiner
Image
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
Image
Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can't bring down.
Olive Schreiner