The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

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

It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that.

You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.