The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing

Ideas that were confined to the far left thirty or forty years ago had pervaded the left generally twenty years ago, and have provided the commonplaces of conventional social thought from right to left for the last ten years. Something so thoroughly absorbed is finished as a force

The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for information about areas of life we don’t know—Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on.

The Communist Party is largely composed of people who aren’t really political at all, but who have a powerful sense of service. And then there are those who are lonely, and the Party is their family.

I wonder how many parents decide to go on living because they have decided not to hurt their children, although they don’t care for living themselves?

felt bored and stale, knowing that, without having read the newspapers at all, I could have made a pretty good guess, from political experience, at what had happened in that week.