The Testaments (The Handmaid's Tale, #2)

by Margaret Atwood

Whatever our shapes and features, we were snares and enticements despite ourselves, we were the innocent and blameless causes that through our very nature could make men drunk with lust, so that they’d

stagger and lurch and topple over the verge

and go plunging down in flames, like snowballs made of burning sulphur hurled b...

We were custodians of an invaluable treasure that existed, unseen, inside us; we were precious flowers that had to be kept safely inside glass houses, or else we would be ambushed and our petals would be torn off and our treasure would be stolen and we would be ripped apart and trampled by the ravenous men who...

I feared that I would end up married to a goat on fire.

The adult female body was one big booby trap as far as I could tell. If there was a hole, something was bound to be shoved into it and something else was bound to come out, and that went for any kind of hole: a hole in a wall, a hole in a mountain, a hole in the ground. There were so many things that could be done to it or go wrong with it, this adult female body, that I was left feeling I would be better off without it. I considered shrinking myself by not eating, and I did try that for a day, but I got so hungry I couldn’t stick to my resolution, and went to the kitchen in the middle of the night and ate chicken scraps out of the soup pot.

I was out of favour with my powerful father.

my stepmother did not wish me

Even New Zealand’s shut the door.”