Offred

"The world was new then"

"We were not prepared for this"

"I try to imagine what it was like before"

"Ignorance is not innocence but it looks like it"

"We were not in control"

"Touch and be touched, that is the only real prayer"

"There are times when I want to die, but not now"

"Language is how we make meaning"

"We are human beings but we have no rights"

"I could have said no, but I said yes"

"Memory is a form of power"

"The future is a country we must discover"

"We lived like that before and we lived like this after"

"I am still alive, I am still alive"

"Beauty is always dangerous"

"Nolite te bastardes carborundorum"

"We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the gaps between the stories."

"Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it."

"The real dictatorship, the real problem, is the gulf between the written and the lived world."

"Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'll never notice that you've lost the ability to get out."

"We were going to be happy, I thought. This will be better."

"The body is text. The body is a story."

"She didn't survive. None of us survived. But that doesn't mean nobody did."

"You can't help them. Nobody can help them."

"Humanity is not necessarily something the Nazis lost."

"Pity is not the point. Nor love. The point is the taking, the ownership."

"I'm sad about the world."

"I want to be held and told my name."

"The women's lives were like that of women in other times, I suppose, in wartime or in wars of religion."

"Humanity is a limited resource, like fossil fuels or uranium."