The Handmaid's Tale

"We are two-legged wombs."

"I don't know what's greater: the fear or the anger."

"I want to feel what I'm supposed to feel."

"I sit in my chair and think about the word chair, because the word came before the thing, or at least alongside it."

"My name is not Offred, I have another name, which nobody knows but myself."

"What I must present as my history."

"I have tried to be more objective. I have tried to show what I know about her through my own eyes."

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

"Nothing changes instantaneously. In a gradually heating bathtub, you'd be boiled to death before you noticed."

"A man in a bed is a man, no more, no less."

"I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me."

"She's just a function, she's not a person."

"We read in secret, in closets, in cellars, in empty boxes."

"I would like to be the air."

"I don't want to breed anymore."

"I am still alive."

"Nature doesn't negotiate."

"I knew nothing about her. You can't know about other people's lives."

"Careless. That's what they were, women here. They swarmed."

"I feel like the word shatter."

"We were not supposed to know one another. We were supposed to be mothers, and nothing else."

"Things have shifted in me. I'm different. I'm not sure in what way."

"I want to be valued, in the way that I am mapped and counted and given a name."

"I lift the laminated card, look at my face, look away."

"The Republic of Gilead knows no bounds. Gilead is within you."

"A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women."

"I want to be left alone, on the boat, with my margarita."

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

"The Republic of Gilead, I said. And felt, rather than heard, a kind of silence, like static."

"I am not her. I am myself."