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

by Margaret Atwood

Aunts: I feared that I would end up married to a goat on fire.

People became frightened. Then they became angry. The absence of viable remedies. The search for someone to blame.

The courts had been closed—temporarily, until a valid line of command and the rule of law could be reinstituted, we were told.

Any forced change of leadership is always followed by a move to crush the opposition. The opposition is led by the educated, so the educated are the first to be eliminated.

No guards put a stop to these efforts. However, by day three the perkiness was fading and few were joining in, and there were mutterings—“Quiet, please!” “For God’s sake, shut up!”—so the Girl Scout leaders, after a few hurt protests—“I was only trying to help”—ceased and desisted. I

that was necessary was a law degree and a uterus: a lethal combination.

Sorry solves nothing, I told myself. Over the years—the many years—how true I have found that to be.

was dead calm. As long as I thought of myself as already dead, untroubled by future cares, things would go

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. Now that I have power myself, I do not encourage flippancy among subordinates.

“Thankful enough to co-operate with us,” he said.

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

The powerless are so tempting.

have noted since that some kinds of men like to bully beautiful women.

What good is it to throw yourself in front of a steamroller out of moral principles and then be crushed flat like a sock emptied of its foot? Better to fade into the crowd, the piously praising, unctuous, hate-mongering crowd.

Keep your friends close but your enemies closer. Having no friends, I must make do with enemies.