Always before I had felt like a person, an individual, hopeful that I could mold my life according to some desire of my own.
AGNES SMEDLEYNew York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
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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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I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman.
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I shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys.
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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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But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called.
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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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When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.
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Like 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.
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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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There’s something dreadfully decisive about a beheading.
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I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
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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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New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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I would not let it ruin me as it ruined others! I would speak only with money, hard money.
AGNES SMEDLEY