I joined another circle and the leader gave us a little leaflet in very small print, asking us to read it carefully and then come prepared to ask questions.
AGNES SMEDLEYThousands of women are crushed and made inarticulate by that system and never develop as their natures would force them to develop were they in a decent environment.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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Friendship is far more human.
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I forgot the songs they sung – and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue.
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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.
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Now, being a girl, I was ashamed of my body and my lack of strength. So I tried to be a man.
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More and more do I see that only a successful revolution in India can break England’s back forever and free Europe itself.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
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.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
She 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 SMEDLEY -
My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
And 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 SMEDLEY -
To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
Thousands of women are crushed and made inarticulate by that system and never develop as their natures would force them to develop were they in a decent environment.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
No one yet knows what a man’s province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
AGNES SMEDLEY