"Our fathers had their dreams; we have ours; the generation that follows will have its own. Without dreams and phantoms man cannot exist"
About this Quote
Schreiner frames “dreams” and “phantoms” not as escapist fluff but as the operating system of history. The line moves in three beats - fathers, us, those after - a neat generational relay that refuses nostalgia and refuses panic. Each cohort gets its own private mythology, and Schreiner’s calm certainty about that cycle reads like a rebuttal to anyone insisting their era’s ideals are uniquely correct or uniquely doomed.
The sting is in “phantoms.” Dreams are aspirational; phantoms are the hauntings we pretend we’ve outgrown - inherited fears, half-beliefs, the stories we tell to justify our place in the world. Schreiner pairs them to argue that human progress isn’t a clean march of reason. It’s driven by imaginaries: utopias, nations, religions, romance, revolution. Even “rational” projects lean on motivating fictions. She’s blunt about dependency: without these spectral narratives, man “cannot exist,” not in the sense of breathing, but in the sense of enduring hardship, organizing society, or choosing a direction when the facts don’t add up to meaning.
Context sharpens the point. Schreiner wrote in an age of industrial upheaval, imperial expansion, and intensifying battles over women’s autonomy and labor. As a South African novelist and critic of empire, she watched grand “civilizing” dreams justify brutal realities. Her sentence doesn’t endorse every dream; it warns that people will have them regardless. The real question is which phantoms we allow to steer us - and who pays for them.
The sting is in “phantoms.” Dreams are aspirational; phantoms are the hauntings we pretend we’ve outgrown - inherited fears, half-beliefs, the stories we tell to justify our place in the world. Schreiner pairs them to argue that human progress isn’t a clean march of reason. It’s driven by imaginaries: utopias, nations, religions, romance, revolution. Even “rational” projects lean on motivating fictions. She’s blunt about dependency: without these spectral narratives, man “cannot exist,” not in the sense of breathing, but in the sense of enduring hardship, organizing society, or choosing a direction when the facts don’t add up to meaning.
Context sharpens the point. Schreiner wrote in an age of industrial upheaval, imperial expansion, and intensifying battles over women’s autonomy and labor. As a South African novelist and critic of empire, she watched grand “civilizing” dreams justify brutal realities. Her sentence doesn’t endorse every dream; it warns that people will have them regardless. The real question is which phantoms we allow to steer us - and who pays for them.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|
More Quotes by Olive
Add to List
