Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man.
AGNES SMEDLEYSubjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man.
AGNES SMEDLEYBut settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called.
AGNES SMEDLEYThere’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
AGNES SMEDLEYI shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys.
AGNES SMEDLEYI have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter.
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 SMEDLEYI 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 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 SMEDLEYNow, being a girl, I was ashamed of my body and my lack of strength. So I tried to be a man.
AGNES SMEDLEYBut 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.
AGNES SMEDLEYMore and more do I see that only a successful revolution in India can break England’s back forever and free Europe itself.
AGNES SMEDLEYNew York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
AGNES SMEDLEYSo I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital.
AGNES SMEDLEYI have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman.
AGNES SMEDLEYNo one yet knows what a man’s province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial.
AGNES SMEDLEYI forgot the songs they sung – and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue.
AGNES SMEDLEY