I feel like a person living on the brink of a volcano crater.
AGNES SMEDLEYI forgot the songs they sung – and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue.
More Agnes Smedley Quotes
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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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I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman.
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Always before I had felt like a person, an individual, hopeful that I could mold my life according to some desire of my own.
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Professors could silence me then; they had figures, diagrams, maps, books.
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So I had to be the doctor to these wounded men until we could remove them to the hospital.
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My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.
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More and more do I see that only a successful revolution in India can break England’s back forever and free Europe itself.
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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.
AGNES SMEDLEY -
I shot, rode, jumped, and took part in all the fights of the boys.
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But there were years when, in search of what I thought was better, nobler things I denied these, my people, and my family.
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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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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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Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man.
AGNES SMEDLEY