Offred

"The trouble is I can no longer believe in endings."

"I thought once I was competent but that's been taken from me."

"This is not the real world."

"Memory is what I have instead of time."

"I would like to go back to the time before."

"The nights are the worst because then I'm alone."

"I don't know how we should be."

"I want to show her something but I don't know what."

"This is what I chose and I have to live with it."

"I have become a serf, a concubine, a thing."

"The real torture is wondering what happens next."

"I am grateful for small mercies."

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

"There is more than one kind of freedom, said Moira. Freedom to and freedom from."

"I'm alive. I'm still alive."

"I want to be valued, in the way that a tree is valued."

"Some days I feel so tired I can't move."

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

"I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of achieving power."

"The problem is I can't believe in it anymore."

"We lived, as usual, by ignoring."

"I wonder who he is thinking of."

"I am not happy. I am far from happy. But I am alive."

"There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power."

"Don't let the bastards grind you down."

"I hate to think of myself as desperate, but I am."

"We were Gilead's past, Janine and me."

"She reaches out and touches my arm, a small gesture, quickly done."

"The night is mine, my own time, to do with as I like, as long as I am quiet."

"I'm losing the exact way her face looked, already."