The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

I hear where you’re coming from, as if the voice itself were a traveler, arriving from a distant place.

Such freedom now seems almost weightless.

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.

Then I think: I used to dress like that. That was freedom.

There is a silence. But sometimes it’s as dangerous not to speak.

This smile of blood is what fixes the attention, finally. These are not snowmen after all.

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 lived in the gaps between the stories.

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.

Her fault, her fault, her fault, we chant in unison.

It was my fault, she says. It was my own fault. I led them on. I deserved the pain.

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.

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

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

he is positively daddyish.

what the hell

Oh God, King of the universe, thank you for not creating me a man.

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

people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning.

Was it really worth it, falling in love?

What I feel is not one simple thing.

Everybody shits, as Moira would say.

I believe you into being.

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They can do what they like with me. I am abject. I feel, for the first time, their true power.