Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale Quotes

You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.

But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.

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

You can think clearly only with your clothes on.

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being.

How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.

To want is to have a weakness.

They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.

I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.

I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

... Remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.

It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.

How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.

Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.

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

I don't smile. Why tempt her to friendship?

Fear is a powerful stimulant.

Perhaps he was merely being friendly. Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette.

In the desert there is no sign that says, 'Thou shalt not eat stones.

He put his arms around me. We were both feeling miserable. How were we to know we were happy, even then? Because we at least had that: arms, around.

I'm sad now, the way we're talking is infinitely sad: faded music, faded paper flowers, worn satin, an echo of an echo. All gone away, no longer possible.

I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.We lived in the gaps between the stories.

And if I talk to him, I'll say something wrong, give something away. I can feel it coming, a betrayal of myself.

Maybe I don’t really want to know what’s going on. Maybe I’d rather not know. Maybe I couldn’t bear to know.The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.

I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.

By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.

It isn't the sort of thing you ask questions about, because the answers are not usually answers you want to know.

You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning.

What should I take? Something that will not be missed. In the wood at midnight, a magic flower.

There is more than one kind of freedom, " said Aunt Lydia. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.

Men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.

The sun is free, it is still there to be enjoyed.

My self is a thing that I must now compose...as one composes a speech. What I must present is a 'made' thing. Not something born.

Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the Latin.

But there's something missing in them, even the nice ones. It's like they're permanently absent-minded, like that can't quite remember who they are.

But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you've made it this far, please remember: you will never be subjected to the temptation of feeling you must forgive, a man, as a woman.

I don't want a man around, what use are they except for ten seconds' worth of half babies

She was not stunned, the way I was. In some strange way she was gleeful, as if this was what she had been expecting for some time and now she'd been proven right.

Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We won't do that again.

Moira had power now, she’d been set loose, she’d set herself loose. She was now a loose woman.I think we found this frightening.

No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well.

As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter...