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

by Margaret Atwood

The corrupt and blood-smeared fingerprints of the past must be wiped away to create a clean space for the morally pure generation that is surely about to arrive. Such is the theory.

because the urges of men were terrible things and those urges needed to be curbed. The man eyes that were always roaming here and there like the eyes of tigers, those searchlight eyes, needed to be shielded from the alluring and indeed blinding power of us—of

Whatever our shapes and features, we were snares and enticements despite ourselves, we were the innocent and blameless causes that through our very nature could make men drunk with lust, so that they’d stagger and lurch and topple over the verge—The

“The better kind have superior characters. Some of them have decent self-restraint.

What my father was doing in there was said to be very important—the important things that men did, too important for females to meddle with because they had smaller brains that were incapable of thinking large thoughts,

how could Job have allowed God to fob off a batch of new children on him and expect him to pretend that the dead ones no longer mattered?

best friends led to whispering and plotting and keeping secrets, and plotting and secrets led to disobedience to God, and disobedience led to rebellion, and girls who were rebellious became women who were rebellious, and a rebellious woman was even worse than a rebellious man because rebellious men became traitors, but rebellious women became adulteresses.

I’ve made it my business to know where the bodies are buried.

“Is your mother the one who gives birth to you or the one who loves you the most?”

I meant it for the best, or for the best available, which is not the same thing.

Topple me and I’ll pull down the temple.

You hold it in, whatever it is, until you can make it through the worst part. Then, once you’re safe, you can cry all the tears you couldn’t waste time crying before.

It’s foolish to joke with those who have absolute control over you.

But loyalty to a higher truth is not treason, for the ways of God are not the ways of man, and they are most emphatically not the ways of woman.”

“Life sucks, end of story,” said Ada. “Now we have to work out where to go from here.”

“Nobody is any authority on the fucks other people give,”

fanatics.” 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.

Already I felt like an outcast; but I’d cast myself out, so I had no right to feel sorry for myself.

Where there is an emptiness, the mind will obligingly fill it up. Fear is always at hand to supply any vacancies, as is curiosity.

you don’t want to be caught saying that a powerful person is small.

She said I was shirking my duty, and any girl who’d been gifted with a woman’s body was obligated to offer this body up in holy sacrifice to God and for the glory of Gilead and mankind, and also to fulfill the function that such bodies had inherited from the moment of Creation, and that was nature’s law.

And Gilead would cherish me too because I was a precious flower, every woman was a precious flower, and especially every girl of my age, and if I was in Gilead I would be treated like the special girl I was, and protected, and no one—no man—would ever be able to hurt me.

I said leggings weren’t men’s clothing, and they said—calmly but firmly—that yes, they were, and it was in the Bible, they were an abomination, and if I wanted to join Gilead I would have to accept that.

But it’s difficult to be grateful for the absence of an unknown quantity.

Being able to read and write did not provide the answers to all questions. It led to other questions, and then to others.

“I wish I had a sister,” she said to me one day. “And if I did, that person would be you.”

Our Bibles were kept locked up, as elsewhere in Gilead: only those of strong mind and steadfast character could be trusted with them, and that ruled out women, except for the Aunts.

The truth was not noble, it was horrible. This was what the Aunts meant, then, when they said women’s minds were too weak for reading. We would crumble, we would fall apart under the contradictions, we would not be able to hold firm.

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.

She said you could believe in Gilead or you could believe in God, but not both.

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

All of this power. All of this potential to judge the wicked in silence, and to punish them in ways they would not be able to anticipate. All of this vengeance.

But then, maybe for her it was natural. Maybe she didn’t know another way.

“You are not unique in the universe. No one has an easy time in life.

How can I have behaved so badly, so cruelly, so stupidly? you will ask. You yourself would never have done such things! But you yourself will never have had to.

what if while we were busily staring down the wolf at the door, another one was creeping over the back fence?