“Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.”

New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.

But 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.

I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.

For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.

There were fifty-four women and forty little boys with the Red Army prisoners, and I went daily to take care of them also.

But there were years when, in search of what I thought was better, nobler things I denied these, my people, and my family.

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.

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.

When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.

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.

Gambling 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.

Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.

There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.

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.

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.

More and more do I see that only a successful revolution in India can break England’s back forever and free Europe itself.

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.

I do not like detached creation. Neither can I conceive of the mind as detached from itself. Each of my works, each diagram of myself, each glacial flowering of my inmost soul dribbles over me.

Fellow, stand away from my diagram.