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.

I hope you will remember, too, that we all have some nostalgia for whatever kindness we have known as children, however bizarre the conditions of that childhood may seem to others.

because the urges of men were terrible things and those urges needed to be curbed.

we were precious flowers that had to be kept safely inside glass houses, or else we would be ambushed and our petals would be torn off and our treasure would be stolen and we would be ripped apart and trampled by the ravenous men who might lurk around any corner, out there in the wide sharp-edged sin-ridden world.

There were swings in one of the parks, but because of our skirts, which might be blown up by the wind and then looked into, we were not to think of taking such a liberty as a swing. Only boys could taste that freedom; only they could swoop and soar; only they could be airborne.

I always made dough men, I never made dough women, because after they were baked I would eat them, and that made me feel I had a secret power over men.

“Just that your mother could have her own baby,” said Zilla soothingly, “so I’m sure you can too. You’d like to have a baby, wouldn’t you, dear?” “Yes,” I said, “but I don’t want a husband. I think they’re disgusting.” The three of them laughed.

I’ve become swollen with power, true, but also nebulous with it—formless, shape-shifting. I am everywhere and nowhere: even in the minds of the Commanders I cast an unsettling shadow. How can I regain myself? How to shrink back to my normal size, the size of an ordinary woman?

All that festers is not gold, but it can be made profitable in non-monetary ways: knowledge is power, especially discreditable knowledge.

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

“But the human heart is devious,”

I’d been in tight corners before. I had prevailed. That was my story to myself.

No, it was not a mercy. It was a convenience for those in charge. Mercy was a quality that did not operate in that place.

The women in charge handed them tissues. They said calm things like You need to be strong. They were trying to make things better. But it can put a lot of pressure on a person to be told they need to be strong. That’s another thing I’ve learned.

“Most likely it is minor, or perhaps even imaginary, as so many of these female complaints prove to be.”

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.

The powerless are so tempting.

Did I weep? Yes: tears came out of my two visible eyes, my moist weeping human eyes. 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.

Reading was not for girls: only men were strong enough to deal with the force of it; and the Aunts, of course, because they weren’t like us.

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.”

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

If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans, as used to be said; though in the present day the idea of God laughing is next door to blasphemy. An ultra-serious fellow, God is now.

She had removed the ungainly babushka-like head covering we are obliged to wear in public to avoid inflaming men, although the idea of any men being inflamed either by Aunt Lise, impressive of profile but alarmingly puckered, or by me, with my greying thatchery and sack-of-potatoes body, is so ludicrous that it hardly needs articulating.

“Well. It’s the penises. It’s like a phobia.” “Penises,” I said thoughtfully. “Them again.”

Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet.

Innocent men denying their guilt sound exactly like guilty men,

“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.

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