The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

The white wings too are prescribed issue; they are to keep us from seeing, but also from being seen.

Modesty is invisibility, said Aunt Lydia. Never forget it.

Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

Nothing changes instantaneously: 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.

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.

This is something you can depend upon: there will always be alliances, of one kind or another.

Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.

As the architects of Gilead knew, to institute an effective totalitarian system or indeed any system at all you must offer some benefits and freedoms, at least to a privileged few, in return for those you remove.

“traditional values,” or for the benefits they might thereby acquire. When power is scarce, a little of it is tempting.