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

by Margaret Atwood

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

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

hadn’t considered what it was like to leave a place you knew, and lose everything, and travel into the unknown. How hollow and dark that must feel, except for maybe the

little glimmer of hope that had allowed you to take such a chance.

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

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

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.

history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

You can take the historian out of the storyteller, but you can’t take the storyteller out of the historian!