“I forgot the songs they sung – and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue.”

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.

So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital.

My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.

Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.

I liked different etymologies, different slang that came out in different eras. Different languages. Different dialects.

The dialect part of it comes into play, but nothing like the differentiation that language sets up, for example.

If you think of music as a universal language, it still has some very powerful dialects.