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 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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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 shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys.
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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 was learning that books and diagrams can be evil things if they deaden the mind of man and make him blind or cynical before subjection of any kind.
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Friendship is far more human.
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My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.
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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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I have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter.
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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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Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
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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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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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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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Always before I had felt like a person, an individual, hopeful that I could mold my life according to some desire of my own.
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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.
AGNES SMEDLEY