More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.
She had not been a personal friend before this time, merely a professional colleague, but it gave me comfort simply to be with someone I knew; someone who personified my previous achievements, my previous life. You might say we bonded. “You were a damn fine judge,” she whispered to me on the third day. “Thank you. So were you,” I whispered back. Were was chilling.
All that was necessary was a law degree and a uterus: a lethal combination.
One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person.
“Nobody is any authority on the fucks other people give,”
She said they were supposed to be dedicated to virtuous godly living, but you could believe you were living virtuously and also murder people if you were a fanatic. Fanatics thought that murdering people was virtuous, or murdering certain people.
It’s better that way, and I am a great proponent of better. In the absence of best. Which is how we live now.
The Aunts, the Marthas, the Wives: despite the fact that they were frequently envious and resentful, and might even hate one another, news flowed among them as if along invisible spiderweb threads.
Where there is an emptiness, the mind will obligingly fill it up. Fear is always at hand to supply any vacancies, as is curiosity.
What am I doing here? I thought. This place is weird as fuck.
So peaceful, the streets; so tranquil, so orderly; yet underneath the deceptively placid surfaces, a tremor, like that near a high-voltage power line. We’re stretched thin, all of us; we vibrate; we quiver, we’re always on the alert. Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet.
“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.
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.
Bearing false witness was not the exception, it was common. Beneath its outer show of virtue and purity, Gilead was rotting.
Such a cruel thing, memory. We can’t remember what it is that we’ve forgotten. That we have been made to forget. That we’ve had to forget, in order to pretend to live here in any normal way.
As they say, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
A BIRD OF THE AIR SHALL CARRY THE VOICE, AND THAT WHICH HATH WINGS SHALL TELL THE MATTER. LOVE IS AS STRONG AS DEATH.
