[...] she looks hard at me, and she says: “You don’t understand. We had no choice. It’s not like today, where the kids think they have the choice to be political or not be political, or be any other damn thing they want to be. We had no choice. We did not choose, we were chosen. Life came in on us, and we were bashed over the head, and we struggled to our knees and to our feet, and when we were standing there was the Communist Party. That was the time, and that’s the kind of people we were.”
Belle, who leaves her husband after he's expelled from the party (quarrels "over union policy and the Stalin Pact")