The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from.

Her speeches were about the sanctity of the home, about how women should stay home. Serena Joy didn’t do this herself, she made speeches instead, but she presented this failure of hers as a sacrifice she was making for the good of all.

you could write on the postcards and send them to anyone you wanted. It seems like such an impossible thing, now; like something you’d make up.

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.

I am not your justification for existence, I said to her once.

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.

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

The roadblocks began to appear, and Identipasses. Everyone approved of that, since it was obvious you couldn’t be too careful.

We’re off to the Prayvaganza, to demonstrate how obedient and pious we are.

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

As long as you said you were some sort of a Christian and you were married, for the first time that is, they were still leaving you pretty much alone. They were concentrating first on the others. They got them more or less under control before they started in on everybody else.

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

I tell, therefore you are.

racist fears provided some of the emotional fuel that allowed the Gilead takeover to succeed as well as it did.