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 SMEDLEYI 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.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
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Yet it is awful to love a person who is a torture to you. And a fascinating person who loves you and won’t hear of anything but your loving him and living right by his side through all eternity!
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I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be.
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So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital.
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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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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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To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty.
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I believe only in money, not in love or tenderness. Love and tenderness meant only pain and suffering and defeat.
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It was a technical Marxist subject and I did not understand it nor did I know what questions to ask.
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Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
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My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.
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