Olive Schreiner - The Story of an African Farm (1883)

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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
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
Greatness is to take the common things of life, and walk truly among them.

Olive Schreiner
There is a love that begins in the head, and goes down to the heart, and grows slowly; but it lasts till death, and asks less than it gives. There is another love, that blots out wisdom, that is sweet with the sweetness of life and bitter with the bitterness of death, lasting for an hour; but it is worth having lived a whole life for that hour.

Olive Schreiner
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
You can't love a man till you've had a baby with him.

Olive Schreiner
The secret of success is concentration, wherever there has been a great life, or a great work, that has gone before. Taste everything a little, look at everything a little; but live for one thing.

Olive Schreiner
Experience teaches us in a millennium what passion teaches us in an hour.

Olive Schreiner
There never was a man who said one word for woman but he said two for man and three for the whole human race.

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

Olive Schreiner
Sin looks much more terrible to those who look at it than to those who do it.

Olive Schreiner
If you have a deadly fruit to give, it will not grow sweeter by keeping.

Olive Schreiner
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.

Olive Schreiner
Wisdom never kicks at the iron walls it can't bring down.

Olive Schreiner
Only the sea is like a human being; the sky is not, nor is the earth. But the sea is always moving, always something deep in itself is stirring it. It never rests; it is always wanting, wanting, wanting.

Olive Schreiner