The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

If only they would look. If only we could talk to them. Something could be exchanged, we thought, some deal made, some tradeoff, we still had our bodies. That was our fantasy.

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.

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.

In this house we all envy each other something.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

"Don't let the bastards grind you down."

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.

But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.

This used to be Detroit.

My name isn’t Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it’s forbidden. I tell myself it doesn’t matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I’ll come back to dig up, one day. I think of this name as buried.

Blessed be the meek. Blessed are the silent. I knew they made that up, I knew it was wrong, and they left things out, too, but there was no way of checking. Blessed be those that mourn, for they shall be comforted.

Nobody said when.

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.

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.

The life of the moon may not be on the surface, but inside.

It can’t last forever. Others have thought such things, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn’t last forever. Although for them it may have lasted all the forever they had.

But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

I am to provide these joys for her. I would rather have the disapproval, I feel more worthy of it.

And he does look embarrassed, sheepish was the word, the way men used to look once. He’s old enough to remember how to look that way, and to remember also how appealing women once found it. The young ones don’t know those tricks. They’ve never had to use them.

Time’s a trap, I’m caught in it.

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

There is something subversive about this garden of Serena’s, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

We are not each other’s, anymore. Instead, I am his.

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

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

They’ll always have been in white, in groups of girls; they’ll always have been silent.

Everything that went on in your life was thought to be due to some positive or negative power emanating from inside your head.

If you don’t like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves. And so we would change the man, for another one. Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.

Waiting is also a place: it is wherever you wait. For me it’s this room. I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people

I’ve mourned for her already. But I will do it again, and again.

I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.

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.