The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

Nothing safer than dead,

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 pregnant woman’s belly is like a huge fruit. Humungous, word of my childhood. Her hands rest on it as if to defend it, or as if they’re gathering something from it, warmth and strength.

We have learned to see the world in gasps.

What I feel is that I must not feel.

It was our hands that were supposed to be full, of the future; which could be held but not seen.

He was so momentary, so condensed. And yet there seemed no end to him.

We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?

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

My body seems outdated.

I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.

If you have a lot of things, said Aunt Lydia, you get too attached to this material world and you forget about spiritual values.

I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.

the amount of unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing. Time as white sound.

That is how I feel: white, flat, thin. I feel transparent. Surely they will be able to see through me.

The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway.

there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.

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.

I didn’t want to live my life on her terms. I didn’t want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas.

But who can remember pain, once it’s over?

Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

Already we were losing the taste for freedom, already we were finding these walls secure.

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

To want is to have a weakness.

Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed against a wall, everything a huge foreground,

Time’s a trap, I’m caught in it.

I suppose all children think that, about any history before their own. If it’s only a story, it becomes less frightening.

It’s amazing what denial can do.

A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.

You can’t stick your hand through a glass window without getting cut,

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

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

Money was the only measure of worth, for everyone, they got no respect as mothers. No wonder they were giving up on the whole business.

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely.

Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.

Being here with him is safety; it’s a cave, where we huddle together while the storm goes on outside.