I have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter.
AGNES SMEDLEYLike 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.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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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Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man.
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In the little hall leading to it was a rack holding various Socialist or radical newspapers, tracts, and pamphlets in very small print and on very bad paper.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
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I have no objection to a man being a man, however masculine that may be.
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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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It is not a national question concerning India any longer; it is purely international.
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New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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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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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 forgot the songs they sung – and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue.
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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.
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When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.
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