The Handmaid's Tale Quotes - Page 12 | Just Great DataBase

at a time, a quick move of the head, up and down, to the side and back. We have learned to see the world

I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If

He wanted me to play Scrabble with him, and kiss him as if I meant it. This was one of the most bizarre things that's happened to me, ever.

Arms up in the air now; let's pretend we're trees.

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.

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.

If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off. It

I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed. There's a lot that doesn't bear thinking about.

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. Someone

I'll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real. So that's how they do it, I thought. I seemed never to have known that before. Luke

God made them that way but He did not make you that way. He made you different. It's up to you to set the boundaries.

There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate

There were the garden shears, the knitting needles; the world is full of weapons if you're looking for them. I should have paid attention

But I'm ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it's false news, it must mean something. We

On these occasions I read quickly, voraciously, almost skimming, trying to get as much into my head as possible before the next long starvation. If it were eating it would be the gluttony of the famished; if it were sex it would be a swift furtive stand-up in an alley somewhere.

I know what you mean, we’d say. Or, a quaint expression you sometimes hear, still, from older people: I hear where you’re coming from, as if the voice itself were a traveller, arriving from a distant place. Which it would be, which it is. How

How was I to know he loved me? It might be just an affair. Why did we ever say just? Though at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.

We lived in the gaps between the stories. From

Lilies used to be a movie theatre, before. Students went there a lot; every spring they had a Humphrey Bogart festival, with Lauren Bacall or Katherine Hepburn, women on their own, making up their minds. They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word 'undone'. These women could not be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose.

All that time, blowing away in the summer breeze. It was daisies for love though, and we did that too

Don't let the bastards grind you down. I repeat this to myself but it conveys nothing. You might as well say, Don't let there be air; or, Don't be.

Modesty is invisibility, said Aunt Lydia. Never forget it. To be seen – to be seen – is to be – her voice trembled – penetrated. What you must be, girls, is impenetrable.

Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy. Already we were losing the taste for freedom, already we were finding these walls secure. In the upper reaches of the atmosphere you'd come apart, you'd vaporize, there would be no pressure holding you together. Nevertheless Moira was our fantasy. We hugged her to us, she was with us in secret, a giggle; she was lava beneath the crust of daily life. In the light of Moira, the Aunts were less fearsome and more absurd. Their power had a flaw to it. They could be shanghaied in toilets. The audacity was what we liked.

I sit in the chair and think about the word chair. It can also mean the leader of a meeting. It can also mean a mode of execution. It is the first syllable in charity. It is the French word for flesh. None of these facts has any connection with the others. These are the kinds of litanies I use, to compose myself.

Once, though, I heard Rita say to Cora that she wouldn't debase herself like that. Nobody asking you, Cora said. Anyways, what could you do, supposing? Go to the Colonies, Rita said. They have the choice. With the Unwomen, and starve to death and Lord knows what all? said Cora. Catch you. They

I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it. Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.

Mayday used to be a distress signal, a long time ago, in one of those wars we studied in high school.

Как просто в ком угодно выдумать гуманность. Какой доступный соблазн. Большой ребенок, говорила она себе. Ее сердце таяло, она убирала у него со лба волосы, целовала в ухо – и не выгоды рада. Инстинкт утешить, облегчить. Тише, тише, говорила она, когда его будил ночной кошмар. Как же тебе достается. Наверняка она во все это верила – иначе как ей жить дальше?

I could just sit here, peacefully. I could withdraw. It's possible to go so far in, so far down and back, they could never get you out.

That is a reconstruction, too.

Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. "It's

Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn?

I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed.

Its racist policies, for instance, were firmly rooted in the pre-Gilead period, and racist fears provided some of the emotional fuel that allowed the Gilead takeover to succeed as well as it did. Our

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh. And

I still have it in me to feel sorry for him. Moira is right, I am a wimp.

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. Someone

What were they? Baptists. They had a stronghold in the Blue Hills. They smoked them out. Praise be. Sometimes I wish she would just shut up and let me walk in

Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes. ***

She's like my own reflection, in a mirror from which I am moving away. In

Ignorieren ist nicht das gleiche wie Ignoranz, man muß etwas dazu tun.

On the wall above the chair, a picture, framed but with no glass: a print of flowers,

There are other women with baskets, some in red, some in the dull green of the Marthas, some in the striped dresses, red and blue and green and cheap and skimpy, that mark the women of the poorer men. Econowives,

It's not the husbands you have to watch out for, said Aunt Lydia, it's the Wives.

I marvel again at the nakedness of men’s lives: the showers right out in the open, the body exposed for inspection and comparison, the public display of privates. What is it for? What purposes of reassurance does it serve? The flashing of a badge, look, everyone, all is in order, I belong here. Why don’t women have to prove to one another that they are women? Some

It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control. I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen? That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on. Look out, said Moira to me, over the phone. Here it comes. Here what comes? I said. You wait, she said. They've been building up to this. It's you and me up against the wall, baby. She was quoting an expression of my mother's, but she wasn't intending to be funny.   Things

A sanidade é um bem valioso; eu a amealho e guardo escondida como as pessoas antigamente amealhavam e escondiam dinheiro. Economizo sanidade, de maneira a vir a ter o suficiente, quando chegar a hora.

It’s strange to remember how we used to think, as if everything were available to us, as if there were no contingencies, no boundaries; as if we were free to shape and reshape forever the ever-expanding perimeters of our lives.

Econowives, they’re called. These