The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

That’s all women have when there is crisis.... their bodies

They’ve removed anything you could tie a rope to.

Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

for ladies in reduced circumstances. That is what we are now. The circumstances have been reduced; for those of us who still have circumstances.

But a chair, sunlight, flowers: these are not to be dismissed. I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight. Where I am is not a prison but a privilege, as Aunt Lydia said, who was in love with either/or.

A sign of authoritarianism wherein no creative thought is allowed

they are to keep us from seeing, but also from being seen.

hunger to commit the act of touch.

Women were not protected then.

Wether protected or not, women are violated and never fully autonomous

There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.

even the names of shops were too much temptation for us.

We have learned to see the world in gasps.

What I feel is that I must not feel.

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.

The first one is the bereaved, the mother; she carries a small black jar. From the size of the jar you can tell how old it was when it foundered, inside her, flowed to its death. Two or three months, too young to tell whether or not it was an Unbaby. The older ones and those that die at birth have boxes.

Funerals for fetuses!!

They also serve who only stand and wait. Or lie down and wait.

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

avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.

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

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

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.

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.

If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult.

It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time.

I’ll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real. So that’s how they do it, I thought. I seemed never to have known that before.

Why? I said. Moira became, over the years, increasingly versed in such anecdotes. I didn’t much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.

A lot of people feel this way today.... it’s discouraging the way the masses react to progress toward equality, toward righting past wrongs, toward reparations

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. No use, that is. No plot.