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 SchreinerA 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.
Olive SchreinerIt is finer to bring one noble human being into the world and rear it well... than to kill ten thousand.
Olive SchreinerA 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 SchreinerPower! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other souls should have power or not? It is born in them.
Olive SchreinerTo 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