The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

A return to traditional values. Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

It isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.

Where I am is not a prison but a privilege, as Aunt Lydia said, who was in love with either/or.

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.

The football stadium is that way too, where they hold the Men’s Salvagings. As well as the football games. They still have those.

Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

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

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

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

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.

she ought to be able to remember this, what it’s like, what’s coming. 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.

But that’s where I am, there’s no escaping it. Time’s a trap, I’m caught in it.

She tried to explain it to me afterwards, to tell me that the things in it had really happened, but to me it was only a story. I thought someone had made it up. I suppose all children think that, about any history before their own. If it’s only a story, it becomes less frightening.

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

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.

Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling.

Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.

Below the red writing there’s a line of smaller print, in black, with the outline of a winged eye on either side of it: God Is a National Resource.

By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you, I believe you’re there, I believe you into being. Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.