The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many. But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you’ve made it this far, please remember: you will never be subject to the temptation or feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman. It’s difficult to resist, believe me. 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. What an available temptation.

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

keep the others safe, if they are safe. Don’t let them suffer too much. If they have to die, let it be fast. You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

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.

If you didn’t work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude. 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.

You’ll have to forgive me. I’m a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I’ve left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.

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

A movie about the past is not the same as the past.

Humanity is so adaptable, my mother would say. Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.