The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

A return to traditional values. Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

From a distance it looks like peace.

Women were not protected then.

In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.

It has taken so little time to change our minds, about things like this.

If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.

How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word.

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

I used to think well of myself. I didn’t then.

It’s my fault, this waste of her time. Not mine, but my body’s, if there is a difference.

checking. Blessed be those that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Nobody said when.

nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for. There wasn’t a lot of choice but there was some, and this is what I chose.

I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable.

am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor.

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 greater the risk the greater the glory.

A thing is valued, she says, only if it is rare and hard to get.

For the ones who come after you, it will be easier. They will accept their duties with willing hearts. She did not say: Because they will have no memories, of any other way. She said: Because they won’t want things they can’t have.

A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women.

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

But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

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.

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

The fact is that I’m his mistress.

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

No mother is ever, completely, a child’s idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well.

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

“You want my life to be bearable to me,” I say. It comes out not as a question but as a flat statement; flat and without dimension. If my life is bearable, maybe what they’re doing is all right after all.

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.

There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There’s something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It’s like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with.