The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

I’m waiting, in my room, which right now is a waiting room. When I go to bed it’s a bedroom.

Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass.

What confronts us, now the excitement’s over, is our own failure.

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.

But there must be something he wants, from me. To want is to have a weakness.

Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

What the Commander said is true. One and one and one and one doesn’t equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together.

The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you’ve been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil. It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.

“Women know that instinctively. Why did they buy so many different clothes, in the old days? To trick the men into thinking they were several different women. A new one each day.”

Fear is a powerful stimulant.

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

Freezing to death is painless, they say, after the first chill. You lie back in the snow like an angel made by children and go to sleep.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.