Quote

[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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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
Littles
Move
Adapted
Soul
Question
Finishing
Little
Seen
Crushed
Human
Small
Schools
Thimble
Humans
Space
Souls
Compressed
Would
Moving
Machines
Experimenting
Found
Room
Nicely
School
Rooms
Fitted

More quotes by Olive Schreiner

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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
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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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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
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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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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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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 been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.
Olive Schreiner
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There was never a great man who had not a great mother.
Olive Schreiner
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God said, 'When one man and one woman shine together, it makes the most perfect light.
Olive Schreiner
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The surest sign of fitness is success.
Olive Schreiner
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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
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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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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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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
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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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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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When the curtain falls no one is ready
Olive Schreiner
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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
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One has no right to form ideals of people, and then, because they don't justify them, become bitter.
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