87 Quotes by 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.

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

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.

We were equals once when we lay new-born babes on our nurse’s knees. We will be equal again when they tie up our jaws for the last sleep.

I have discovered that of all cursed places under the sun, where the hungriest soul can hardly pick up a few grains of knowledge, a girls’ boarding-school is the worst. They are called finishing schools, and the name tells accurately what they are. They finish everything but imbecility and weakness, and that they cultivate.

Why hate, and struggle, and fight? Let is be as it would.

I am not in so great a hurry to put my neck beneath any man’s foot; and I do not so greatly admire the crying of babies.

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.

The meanest girl who dances and dresses becomes something higher when her children look up into her face and ask her questions. It is the only education we have and which they cannot take from us.