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 SMEDLEYNo one yet knows what a man’s province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
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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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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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I would not let it ruin me as it ruined others! I would speak only with money, hard money.
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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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Friendship is far more human.
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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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But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called.
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New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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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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Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.
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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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It was a technical Marxist subject and I did not understand it nor did I know what questions to ask.
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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 have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman.
AGNES SMEDLEY