The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

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

Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied.

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

It’s this message, which may never arrive, that keeps me alive. I believe in the message.

One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope. In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?

But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

To want is to have a weakness.

That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.

You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that.

The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.

Dear God, I think, I will do anything you like. Now that you’ve let me off, I’ll obliterate myself, if that’s what you really want; I’ll empty myself, truly, become a chalice. I’ll give up Nick, I’ll forget about the others, I’ll stop complaining. I’ll accept my lot. I’ll sacrifice. I’ll repent. I’ll abdicate. I’ll renounce.

When power is scarce, a little of it is tempting.