“Now, being a girl, I was ashamed of my body and my lack of strength. So I tried to be a man.”

When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.

I was ashamed of them and their ways of life. But now – yes, I love them; they are a part of my blood; they, with all their virtues and their faults, played a great part in forming my way of looking at life.

Gambling in the mark has been the great indoor sport of the capitalists for months, and consequently food has increased by 25 to 100 per cent.

Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.

There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.

But here in New York I was ignorant, insignificant, unimportant–one in millions whose destiny concerned no one. New York did not even know of my existence. Nor did it care.

Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.

There are many men – such as those often to be found among the Indians – who are refined until they have qualities often attributed to the female sex. Yet they are men, and strong ones.

More and more do I see that only a successful revolution in India can break England’s back forever and free Europe itself.

No one yet knows what a man’s province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial.

I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be.

The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.

I believe only in money, not in love or tenderness. Love and tenderness meant only pain and suffering and defeat.

Always before I had felt like a person, an individual, hopeful that I could mold my life according to some desire of my own.

But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called.

Like all my family and class, I considered it a sign of weakness to show affection; to have been caught kissing my mother would have been a disgrace, and to have shown affection for my father would have been a disaster.