The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.

Even now that there is no real money anymore, there’s still a black market. There’s always a black market, there’s always something that can be exchanged.

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 are two-legged wombs, that’s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.

Context is all.

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.

Kick in the door, and what did I tell you? Caught in the act, sinfully Scrabbling. Quick, eat those words.

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

The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you’ve been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil.

It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.

What you don’t know won’t tempt you,

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

Or I’d hold one under her chin: Do you like butter? Smelling them, she’d get pollen on her nose. Or was that buttercups?

But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.

You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.