Agnes Smedley - Daughter of Earth (1929)

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I have loved and bitterness left me for that hour. But there are times when love itself is bitter.

Agnes Smedley
To die would have been beautiful. But I belong to those who do not die for the sake of beauty.

Agnes Smedley
But settled things were enemies to me and soon lost their newness and color. The unknown called.

Agnes Smedley
Subjection of any kind and in any place is beneath the dignity of man... 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.

Agnes Smedley
New York was a new and strange world. Vast, impersonal, merciless.... Always before I had felt like a person, an individual, hopeful that I could mold my life according to some desire of my own. 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.

Agnes Smedley
My mother listened to all the news from the camp during the strike. 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.

Agnes Smedley
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. The subjects treated were technical Marxist theories.

Agnes Smedley
But there were years when, in search of what I thought was better, nobler things I denied these, my people, and my family. I forgot the songs they sung - and most of those songs are now dead; I erased their dialect from my tongue; 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.

Agnes Smedley