New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
AGNES SMEDLEYNew York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
AGNES SMEDLEYThere were fifty-four women and forty little boys with the Red Army prisoners, and I went daily to take care of them also.
AGNES SMEDLEYI believe only in money, not in love or tenderness. Love and tenderness meant only pain and suffering and defeat.
AGNES SMEDLEYAnd the woman who could win the respect of man was often the woman who could knock him down with her bare fists and sit on him until he yelled for help.
AGNES SMEDLEYFriendship is far more human.
AGNES SMEDLEYBut there were years when, in search of what I thought was better, nobler things I denied these, my people, and my family.
AGNES SMEDLEYLike 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.
AGNES SMEDLEYSubjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man.
AGNES SMEDLEYThe highest joy is to fight by the side of those who for any reason of their own making or ours, are unable to develop to full human stature.
AGNES SMEDLEYI was learning that books and diagrams can be evil things if they deaden the mind of man and make him blind or cynical before subjection of any kind.
AGNES SMEDLEYI forgot the songs they sung – and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue.
AGNES SMEDLEYShe said little, especially when my father or the men who worked for him were about I remember her instinctive and unhesitating sympathy for the miners.
AGNES SMEDLEYWhen I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.
AGNES SMEDLEYEverybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
AGNES SMEDLEYI have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter.
AGNES SMEDLEYI would not let it ruin me as it ruined others! I would speak only with money, hard money.
AGNES SMEDLEY