The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood

"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 bein given freedom from. Don't underrate it." 24

". . . women on their own, making up their minds. They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone. These women could be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose." 25

"We have learned to see the world in gasps." 30

"We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it." 56

"We lived in the gaps between the stories." 57

"I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born." 66

"This contradictory way of believeing seems to me, right now, the only way I can believe anything. Whatever the truth is, I will be ready for it." 106

"We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectivies." 114
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"A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women." 121
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"It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, cross currents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully descried, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many." 134

" . . . forgiveness too is power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest." 135

"Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Mabye it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing." 135

"To want is to have a weakness." 136
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"Context is all." 144

"Winter is not so dangerous. I need hardness, cold, rigidity; not this heviness, as if I'm a mealon on a stem, this liquid ripeness." 154

"Context is all; or is it ripeness?" 192
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"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." 195

"Better never means better fro everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some." 211
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"God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man besided us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always for the incarnation. That word, made flesh." 226

" . . . most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal." 227