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Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner
b. 3-24-1855; South Africa
d. 12-11-1920
Author, pacifist and political activist Olive Schreiner is best known for her first novel The Story of an African Farm, published in 1883 under the pseudomyn Ralph Iron.
The novel, considerd to be one of the first feminist novels, was an immediate success, fueled by controversary of addressing agnostism and the treatment of women. Today it is considered semi-autobiographical.
Schreiner also wrote an introduction to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and was in contact with Havelock Ellis and Mahatma Gandhi.
Olive Schreiner quotes ~
• “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.”
• “My feeling is that there is nothing in life but refraining from hurting others, and comforting those that are sad.”
• “The troubles of the young are soon over; they leave no external mark. If you wound the tree in its youth the bark will quickly cover the gash; but when the tree is very old, peeling the bark off, and looking carefully, you will see the scar there still. All that is buried is not dead.”
• “Everything has two sides - the outside that is ridiculous, and the inside that is solemn.”
• “There was never a great man who had not a great mother.”
• “A little weeping, a little wheedling, a little self-degradation, a little careful use of our advantages, and then some man will say, “Come, be my wife!” With good looks and youth marriage is easy to attain. There are men enough; but a woman who has sold herself, even for a ring and a new name, need hold her skirt aside for no creature in the street. They both earn their bread in one way. 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.”
• “We all enter the world little plastic beings, with so much natural force, perhaps, but for the rest / blank; and the world tells us what we are to be, and shapes us by the ends it sets before us. To you it says / Work; and to us it says / Seem! To you it says / As you approximate to man's highest ideal of God, as your arm is strong and your knowledge great, and the power to labor is with you, so you shall gain all that human heart desires. To us it says / Strength shall not help you, nor knowledge, nor labor. You shall gain what men gain, but by other means. And so the world makes men and women.”
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