Always before I had felt like a person, an individual, hopeful that I could mold my life according to some desire of my own.
AGNES SMEDLEYI shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
It was a technical Marxist subject and I did not understand it nor did I know what questions to ask.
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I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
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I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be.
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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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New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.
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But there were years when, in search of what I thought was better, nobler things I denied these, my people, and my family.
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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.
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I have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter.
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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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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.
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Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
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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