Offred

"I'm thirty-three years old. My name is not Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it's forbidden."

"Waiting is different from wanting."

"I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling."

"We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print."

"I want to be in love. I want it to be with him."

"The night is my time out. Where should I go?"

"I felt as if I was being tested. I'm still not sure for what."

"The year before the catastrophe, I didn't pay enough attention."

"I want to be with him in bed, in the dark."

"I wonder whether they enjoy it. I think about that sometimes."

"Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it."

"I could not see my feet anymore. I felt like a seal."

"He puts his hand on my knee. His other hand is on my leg."

"I sit in the chair and think about how to live a life that doesn't involve waiting."

"What they are is dangerous. But so am I."

"I don't want to be here, in my head, alone."

"The world is full of men we don't know."

"I'm afraid. It shows on my face."

"His body is bulk, his hands thick and stubbed-fingered."

"I don't want him to see me. He must not see me."

"I know why there are no mirrors. It's not because of the mirrors."

"You're a person until they say you're not."

"We learned to whisper almost without sound."

"The distance between here and there is also a distance in time."

"I am not sterile. That's one of the things I've retained."

"What happened to the others? I ask myself, who were we before?"

"He pulls me close and whispers into my hair."

"I am not alone. I am not in the dark anymore."

"I remember my name."

"The tulips are opening."