The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

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.

in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

Why am I frightened? I’ve crossed no boundaries, I’ve given no trust, taken no risk, all is safe. It’s the choice that terrifies me. A way out, a salvation.

believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.

One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope. In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive? Does Luke hope?

I think that this is what God must look like: an egg. The life of the moon may not be on the surface, but inside.

And I for him. To him I’m no longer merely a usable body. To him I’m not just a boat with no cargo, a chalice with no wine in it, an oven—to be crude—minus the bun. To him I am not merely empty.

It’s outrageous, one woman said, but without belief. What was it about this that made us feel we deserved it?