Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"Where there is an emptiness, the mind will obligingly fill it up. Fear is always at hand to supply any vacancies, as is curiosity. I have had ample experience with both."

"I am a great proponent of better. In the absence of best. Which is how we live now."

"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."

"“So that’s why you work with Mayday?” I said. “It’s personal?” “Everything’s personal, when you come right down to it,” she said."

"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."

"If you are familiar with school playgrounds of the rougher sort, or with henyards, or indeed with any situation in which the rewards are small but the competition for them is fierce, you will understand the forces at work."

"It has an acid smell, fear. It’s corrosive."

"I took care not to react. It’s a skill, not reacting."

"But I forgive you in advance. I, too, was once like you: fatally hooked on life."

"Wedlock: it had a dull metallic sound, like an iron door clicking shut."

"Reading was not for girls: only men were strong enough to deal with the force of it.."

"You’d be surprised how quickly the mind goes soggy in the absence of other people. One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person."

"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."

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

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

"How tedious is a tyranny in the throes of enactment. It’s always the same plot."

"...but you would be amazed at how important such things become—basics that you’ve taken for granted, that you’ve barely thought about until they’re removed from you."

"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."

"Topple me and I’ll pull down the temple."

"I was not supposed to witness a Birth.Girls&marriageable young women—such as I’d just become by having my period—were not allowed to see or know what went on,because such sights and sounds were not suitable for us and might be harmful to us—might disgust us or frighten us.That thick red knowledge was for married women and Handmaids,and for the Aunts,of course,so they could teach it to the midwife Aunts in training"

"Maybe she was like God—real but unreal at the same time. What if I were to pray to Aunt Lydia at night, instead of to God? I did try, later in the week. But the idea was too unthinkable—praying to a woman—so I stopped."

"...this adult female body, that I was left feeling I would be better off without it."

"Why couldn’t God have arranged it otherwise? But he had a special interest in blood,"

"It was like lisping—as if God did not know how to speak clearly."

"I’ve had cause to notice over the course of what you might call my Gilead career that underlings given sudden power frequently become the worst abusers of it."

“If you’re a woman. That’s what the airline said. The provisional government has just passed new laws: women’s money now belongs to the male next of kin.”

"You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you."

"The Pearl Girls were originally my idea—other religions had missionaries, so why not ours? And other missionaries had produced converts, so why not ours? And other missionaries had gathered information used in espionage, so why not ours?"

"I control the women’s side of their enterprise with an iron fist in a leather glove in a woolen mitten, and I keep things orderly: like a harem eunuch, I am uniquely placed to do so."

"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 have still never been on a swing. It remains one of my wishes."