The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

First, is The Handmaid’s Tale a “feminist” novel? If you mean an ideological tract in which all women are angels and/or so victimized they are incapable of moral choice, no. If you mean a novel in which women are human beings – with all the variety of character and behavior that implies – and are also interesting and important, and what happens to them is crucial to the theme, structure, and plot of the book, then yes.

In the desert there is no sign that says, Thou shalt not eat stones. –

There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

I want Luke here so badly. I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name, remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me.

But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from.

believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.

sane. Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.

To want is to have a weakness. It’s this weakness, whatever it is, that entices me.

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.

What’s dangerous in the hands of the multitudes, he said, with what may or may not have been irony, is safe enough for those whose motives are … Beyond reproach, I said.

I don’t love the Commander or anything like it, but he’s of interest to me, he occupies space, he is more than a shadow.

It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the President and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time.

You can’t help what you feel, Moira said once, but you can help how you behave.