"The point is," said Anna, as her friend came back
from the telephone on the landing, "the point is, that
as far as I can see, everything's cracking up."
The Golden Notebook
Anna Wulf meets her friend Molly Jacobs
after a year apart, opening lines of novel, Free Women: 1. |
Free women," said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger
new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing
glance from her friend: "They still define us in terms
of relationships with men, even the best of them."
The Golden Notebook
Free Women: 1. |
One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a
novel should have to make it a novel - the quality of philosophy.
The Golden Notebook
Anna Wulf, Free Women: 1. |
Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided,
and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that
they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information
about other groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping
out for their own wholeness, and the novel-report is a means
toward it.
The Golden Notebook
Anna Wulf, Free Women: 1. |
The real revolution is, women against men.
The Golden Notebook
Paul to Ella, Free Women: 1. |
Literature is analysis after the event.
The Golden Notebook
Free Women: 1. |
Obviously, my changing everything into fiction is simply a
means of concealing something from myself.
The Golden Notebook
Anna writes, Free Women: 1. |
The difference between my father and me is that I know I'm
commonplace and he doesn't.
The Golden Notebook
Molly's son Tommy on his father, Free Women:
2. |
She understood suddenly that she would never come with this
man. She thought: for women like me, integrity isn't chastity,
it isn't fidelity, it isn't any of the old words. Integrity
is the orgasm.
The Golden Notebook
Ella as Cy Maitland has sex with her, Free
Women: 2. |
While Michael grips me and fills me the noises next door continue,
and I know he hears them too, and that part of the pleasure,
for him, is to take me in hazard; that Janet, the little girl,
the eight-year-old, represents to him partly women - other women,
whom he betrays to sleep with me; and partly, child; the essence
of child, against whom he is asserting his rights to live.
The Golden Notebook
Anne wakes early and Michael has sex with
her while Janet is awake in next room, Free Women: 2. |
He prefers Janet to have left for school before he wakes.
And I prefer it, because it divides me. The two personalities
- Janet's mother, Michael's mistress, are happier separated.
It is a strain having to be both at once.
The Golden Notebook
Molly, on Michael's day for going to the
hospital in South London, Free Women: 2. |
The real crime of the British Communist Party is the number
of marvelous people it has either broken, or turned into dry-as-dust
hair-splitting office men, living in a closed group with other
communists, and cut off from everything that goes on it their
own country.
The Golden Notebook
Anna thinks, Free Women: 2. |
There they sat, thinking in spite of themselves of the mutilated
boy just below them, who was now the centre of the house, dominating
it, conscious of everything that went on in it, a blind but
all-conscious presence.
The Golden Notebook
Anna and Molly and Tommy, Free Women: 3. |
'He's happy for the first time in his life. That's what's
so terrible...you can see it in how he moves and talks - he's
all in one piece for the first time in his life.' Molly gasped
in horror at her own words, hearing what she had said: all
in one piece, and matching them against the truth of that
mutilation.
The Golden Notebook
Of Tommy, Free Women: 3. |
As Ella cracks and disintegrates, she holds fast to the idea
of Ella whole, healthy and happy.
The Golden Notebook
Free Women: 3, pg. 430. |
All this was taken by her as part of the hazards and chances
of being a 'free woman.'
The Golden Notebook
Ella, on married men temporarily wifeless
trying to have affairs with her, Free Women: 3. |
Yes, cannibals. People are just cannibals unless they leave
each other alone.
The Golden Notebook
Ella's father to Ella, Free Women: 3. |
I remember saying to her that for the larger part of our time
together her task was to make me conscious of, to become preoccupied
by, physical facts which we spend our childhood learning to
ignore so as to live at all.
The Golden Notebook
Anna on the 'experience' with Mother Sugar,
Free Women: 3. |
In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and
say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen
to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking
off, by limiting themselves.
The Golden Notebook
Anna, Free Women: 3. |
But sometimes I meet people, and it seems to me the fact they
are cracked across, they're split, means they are keeping themselves
open for something.
The Golden Notebook
Anna, Free Women: 3. |
Well, Anna, I've been thinking a lot about that sort of thing,
since I tried to shoot myself, and I've come to the conclusion
that you're wrong. I think people need other people to be kind
to them.
The Golden Notebook
Tommy, who says Anna thinks he is a "bloody
welfare worker, what a waste of time", Free Women: 4. |
Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody
in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person
I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd
be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling
the truth.
The Golden Notebook
Tommy, Free Women: 4. |
All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to
feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing
the bones are moving easily under the flesh.
The Golden Notebook
Anna thinking, Free Women: 4. |
Only one person read them. He tried to kill himself, failed,
blinded himself, and has now turned into what he tried to kill
himself to prevent.
The Golden Notebook
Anna Wulf, about her salutarily-bound books,
Free Women: 5. |
There's only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself
that the second-best is anything but the second-best.
The Golden Notebook
Anna Wulf, Free Women: 5. |
None of you ask for anything - except everything, but just
for so long as you need it.
The Golden Notebook
Anna Wulf, Free Women: 5. |
Though what thoughts of regret, or pity, or perhaps even wounded
human affection were compounded with the satisfaction of [Moses']
completed revenge, it is impossible to say. For, when he had
gone perhaps a couple of hundred yards through the soaking bush
he stopped, turned aside, and leaned against a tree on an ant-heap
And there he would remain, until his pursuers, in their turn,
came to find him.
The Golden Notebook
Chapter 11. |
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