The Testaments (The Handmaid's Tale, #2)

by Margaret Atwood

knowledge is power, especially discreditable knowledge. I am not the first person to have recognized this, or to have capitalized on it when possible: every intelligence agency in the world has always known it.

It’s foolish to joke with those who have absolute control over you. They don’t like it; they think you don’t appreciate the full extent of their power.

alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person.

Whatever my resolve might be: after some days I lost track of that plotline. The plotline of my resolve.

But I had a third eye, in the middle of my forehead. I could feel it: it was cold, like a stone. It did not weep: it saw. And behind it someone was thinking: I will get you back for this. I don’t care how long it takes or how much shit I have to eat in the meantime, but I will do it.

All things come to she who waits. Time wounds all heels. Patience is a virtue. Vengeance is mine.

The truth can cause a lot of trouble for those who are not supposed to know it.

In that case, I would destroy these pages I have written so laboriously; and I would destroy you along with them, my future reader. One flare of a match and you’ll be gone—wiped away as if you had never been, as if you will never be. I would deny you existence. What a godlike feeling! Though it is a god of annihilation. I waver, I waver. But tomorrow is another day.

Totalitarianisms may crumble from within, as they fail to keep the promises that brought them to power; or they may be attacked from without; or both. There are no sure-fire formulas, since very little in history is inevitable.