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 SMEDLEYIt is not a national question concerning India any longer; it is purely international.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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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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.
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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.
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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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New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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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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It is not a national question concerning India any longer; it is purely international.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
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.
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I would not let it ruin me as it ruined others! I would speak only with money, hard money.
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Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man.
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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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There were fifty-four women and forty little boys with the Red Army prisoners, and I went daily to take care of them also.
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Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
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I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
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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.
AGNES SMEDLEY