Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
73 quotes
"You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves."
"I was taking something away from her, although she didn't know it. I was filching. Never mind that it was something she apparently didn't want or had no use for, had rejected even; still, it was hers, and if I took it away, this mysterious "it" I couldn't quite define."
"Maybe I don’t really want to know what’s going on. Maybe I’d rather not know. Maybe I couldn’t bear to know.The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge."
"If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too. Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise. If you didn't work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude."
"We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces on the edges of print."
"Fear is a powerful stimulant."
"I don't smile. Why tempt her to friendship?"
"We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.We lived in the gaps between the stories."
"The sun is free, it is still there to be enjoyed."
"I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolor picture of blue irises, and why the window opens only partly and why the glass in it is shatter-proof. It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge."
"My self is a thing that I must now compose...as one composes a speech. What I must present is a 'made' thing. Not something born."
"Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We won't do that again."
"As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter..."
"As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our day."
"How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all."
"But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind."
"Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there’s something dead about it, something deserted."
"No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well."
"But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing."
"There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt with."
"Moira had power now, she’d been set loose, she’d set herself loose. She was now a loose woman.I think we found this frightening."
"A bachelor, a studio, those were the names for that kind of apartment. Separate entrance it would say in the ads, and that meant you could have sex, unobserved."
"I remember Queen Victoria's advice to her daughter. Close your eyes and think of England."
"Not that it isn't great to see you. But it's not so great for you. What'd you do wrong? Laugh at his dick?"
"There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures flickering over lifting flesh. We yearned for the future How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?"