The Handmaid's Tale

"The window is small, too high up for me to see much."

"She is a real person. She is real. She is here."

"I'm trying to look serious, like I understand the seriousness of the situation."

"The truth is that we are not."

"We were not women in the usual sense."

"She's going to die. She might die anyway."

"I'm not really here, I'm in another city, another time."

"You are not your own, or are you?"

"She was the kind of person to whom things are done, not the kind that does."

"I didn't know who to trust. They could have been plants, spies."

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

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

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

"To be a man is to be in a state of constant combat."

"I'm sad about the world."

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

"Humanity is not necessarily something the Nazis lost."

"I know what it is to have a man there who shouldn't be."

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

"A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, so long as it likes the food they've left there."

"Pain here and now is worse than pain remembered."

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

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

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

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

"I'm nuts, they tell me. Unstable. Medically diagnosed."

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

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

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

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