I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
AGNES SMEDLEYI feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
AGNES SMEDLEYI believe only in money, not in love or tenderness. Love and tenderness meant only pain and suffering and defeat.
AGNES SMEDLEYThere 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.
AGNES SMEDLEYMuch that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.
AGNES SMEDLEYGambling 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.
AGNES SMEDLEYBut I see no reason why a woman should not grow and develop in all those outlets which are suited to her nature, it matters not at all what they may be.
AGNES SMEDLEYIt was a technical Marxist subject and I did not understand it nor did I know what questions to ask.
AGNES SMEDLEYThere’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
AGNES SMEDLEYAnd 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.
AGNES SMEDLEYI forgot the songs they sung – and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue.
AGNES SMEDLEYThe highest joy is to fight by the side of those who for any reason of their own making or ours, are unable to develop to full human stature.
AGNES SMEDLEYTo die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty.
AGNES SMEDLEYFriendship is far more human.
AGNES SMEDLEYI would not let it ruin me as it ruined others! I would speak only with money, hard money.
AGNES SMEDLEYI 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.
AGNES SMEDLEYEverybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
AGNES SMEDLEY