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Forbidden things are open to the imagination.
Right now I still have some choice in the matter. Not whether to die, but when and how. Isn’t that freedom of a sort?
You take the first step, and to save yourself from the consequences, you take the next one.
discretion is the better part of valour,
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.
You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.
I found her original name. Meaningless, I know, except for those who must have loved her and then been torn apart from her. But for me it was like finding a handprint in a cave: it was a sign, it was a message. I was here. I existed. I was real.
Whoever said consistency is a virtue?
How tedious is a tyranny in the throes of enactment. It’s always the same plot.
One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person.
Keep your friends close but your enemies closer. Having no friends, I must make do with enemies.
“Nobody is any authority on the fucks other people give,”
“Having faith is hard work sometimes.”
“No one wants to die,” said Becka. “But some people don’t want to live in any of the ways that are allowed.”
Being able to read and write did not provide the answers to all questions. It led to other questions, and then to others.
Up until that time I had not seriously doubted the rightness and especially the truthfulness of Gilead’s theology. If I’d failed at perfection, I’d concluded that the fault was mine. But as I discovered what had been changed by Gilead, what had been added, and what had been omitted, I feared I might lose my faith.
If you’ve never had a faith, you will not understand what that means. You feel as if your best friend is dying; that everything that defined you is being burned away; that you’ll be left all alone. You feel exiled, as if you are lost in a dark wood. It was like the feeling I’d had when Tabitha died: the world was emptying itself of meaning. Everything was hollow. Everything was withering.
Still, I wanted to believe; indeed I longed to; and, in the end, how much of belief comes from longing?
Once a story you’ve regarded as true has turned false, you begin suspecting all stories.
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.
She who cannot control herself cannot control the path to duty. Do not fight the waves of anger, use the anger as your fuel. Inhale. Exhale. Sidestep. Circumvent. Deflect.
Fly well, my messengers, my silver doves, my destroying angels. Land safely.
A BIRD OF THE AIR SHALL CARRY THE VOICE, AND THAT WHICH HATH WINGS SHALL TELL THE MATTER.
