The Handmaid's Tale

"I'm like a sponge. I absorb things."

"Survival is a privilege."

"She has been obliterated; she has been replaced."

"We were the people who were not in the papers."

"Give me children or I shall die."

"I'm not a dead yet."

"The trouble is you can't live for five years with someone without wanting to know about them."

"Lying in bed in the dark with Luke had not been adultery."

"Fear tastes like metal."

"I feel very tender, raw, like a newborn."

"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 transportation."

"She doesn't know if she is happy or not."

"The past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes."

"I am not a free woman."

"Humanity is a passing phase."

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

"I think about my daughter; I wait and I don't know for what."

"My name is Offred, but that's not really my name."

"The world has changed; I am the same, but the world has changed around me."

"I'm alive, I'm alive. But there's no blindness here."

"Better never means better for everyone. It always means worse for some."

"We are two-legged wombs, that's all: conscious entities squirting out a new generation for the State."

"Knowledge is power."

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

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

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

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

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

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