Olive Schreiner

Olive Schreiner (1889)

Olive Schreiner (24 March 1855 – 11 December 1920) was a South African author, anti-war campaigner and intellectual.

Quotes

The Story of an African Farm (1883)

• The full African moon poured down its light from the blue sky into the wide, lonely plain. The dry, sandy earth, with its coating of stunted ‘karroo’ bushes a few inches high, the low hills that skirted the plain, the milk-bushes with their long, finger-like leaves, all were touched by a weird and almost oppressive beauty as they lay in the white light.”
  • Part 1, Chapter 1, Page 35; The opening of the novel devotes considerable attention to the setting, which will influence the development of the characters and the movement of the plot.

• And you do not need to. When you are seventeen this Boer-woman will go; you will have this farm and everything that is upon it for your own; but I,’ said Lyndall, ‘will have nothing. I must learn.’”
  • Part 1, Chapter 2, Page 46; Lyndall tells Em why she must have an education: She stands to inherit nothing, and she wishes to be independent.

• Very tenderly the old man looked at him. He saw not the bloated body nor the evil face of the man; but, as it were, under deep disguise and fleshly concealment, the form that long years of dreaming had made very real to him.
  • Part 1, Chapter 3, Pages 56-57; Otto gazes upon the sleeping form of Bonaparte Blenkins, who has shown up at the farm worse for wear.

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

• 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.

• Marriage for love is the beautifulest external symbol of the union of souls, marriage without it is the uncleanliest traffic that defiles the world.

• 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.

Quotes about Olive Schreine

• When Olive Schreiner, aged seventeen, wrote the South African Farm, some among her friends were disappointed she had not called more upon her imagination and described wild and thrilling adventures, as her country might have suggested. "Such works," she says in her Preface to this wonderful book, "are best written in Piccadilly or the Strand; there the gifts of creative imagination, untrammelled by contact with fact, may spread their wings. Those brilliant phases and shapes are not for her to portray. Sadly she must squeeze the colour from her brush. She must paint what lies before her."
  • Mary Drew - Foreword ("Men I Have Painted" - John McLure Hamilton)

• The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner is often thought of as being the beginning of South African literature. She stood more or less alone.
  • 1970 interview in Conversations with Nadine Gordimer edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour (1990)