I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
AGNES SMEDLEYNew York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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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The 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.
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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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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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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.
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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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It is not a national question concerning India any longer; it is purely international.
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I believe only in money, not in love or tenderness. Love and tenderness meant only pain and suffering and defeat.
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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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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.
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New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.
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I have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter.
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In the little hall leading to it was a rack holding various Socialist or radical newspapers, tracts, and pamphlets in very small print and on very bad paper.
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Yet it is awful to love a person who is a torture to you. And a fascinating person who loves you and won’t hear of anything but your loving him and living right by his side through all eternity!
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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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No one yet knows what a man’s province is, and how far that province, as conceived of today, is artificial.
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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.
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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.
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Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
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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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The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.
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I shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys.
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Everybody calls everybody a spy, secretly, in Russia, and everybody is under surveillance. You never feel safe.
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Much that we read of Russia is imagination and desire only.
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For the first week of the Sian events I was a first aid worker in the streets of Sian.
AGNES SMEDLEY