The Handmaid’s Tale Quotes

“That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I try to remember if the past was exactly like this. I'm not sure, now. I know it contained these things, but somehow the mix is different. A movie about the past is not the same as the past”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“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, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many. 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 subject to the temptation or feeling you must forgive, a man, as a women. It's difficult to resist, believe me. But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it….By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you….Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“The tulips along the border are redder than ever, opening, no longer wine cups but chalices; thrusting themselves up, to what end? They are, after all, empty. When they are old they turn themselves inside out, explode slowly, the petals thrown like shards.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I don’t even close my eyes. Out there or inside my head, it’s an equal darkness. Or light.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“In front of us, to the right, is the store where we order dresses. Some people call them habits, a good word for them. Habits are hard to break. ”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“To want is to have a weakness. It's this weakness, whatever it is, that entices me. It's like a small crack in a wall, before now impenetrable.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures flickering over lifting flesh. We yearned for the future How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and can be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it's one of the shapes money takes when it freezes. Money has trickled through this room for years and years, as if through an underground cavern, crusting and hardening like stalactites into these forms.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Nobody's heart is perfect.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Perhaps he's reached that state of intoxication which power is said to inspire, the state in which you believe you are indispensable and can therefore do anything, absolutely anything you feel like, anything at all.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I was taking something away from her, although she didn't know it. I was filching. Never mind that it was something she apparently didn't want or had no use for, had rejected even; still, it was hers, and if I took it away, this mysterious "it" I couldn't quite define.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Flowers, for instance, because where would we be without them?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Two-thirty comes during Testifying. It's Janine, telling about how she was gang-raped at fourteen and had an abortion.But whose fault was it? Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger. Her fault, her fault, her fault. We chant in unison. Who led them on? She did. She did. She did. Why did God allow such a terrible thing to happen? Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I guess that's how they were able to do it, in the way they did, all at once, without anyone knowing beforehand. If there had still been portable money, it would have been more difficult.
"It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time.
"Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control.
"I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?
"That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed at home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could point your finger at.
...
"Newspapers were censored and some were closed down, for security reasons they said. The roadblocks began to appear, and Identipasses. Everyone approved of that, since it was obvious you couldn't be too careful.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon...”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I remember a television program I once saw [...] I must have been seven or eight, too young to understand it. It was the sort of thing my mother liked to watch: historical, educational. She tried to explain it to me afterwards, to tell me that the things in it had really happened, but to me it was only a story. I thought someone had made it up. I suppose all children think that, about any history before their own. If it's only a story, it becomes less frightening.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“...there was little that was truly original or indigenous to Gilead. Its genius was synthesis.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“There are to be no toeholds for love. We are two-legged wombs, that’s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“What we prayed for was emptiness, so we would be worthy to be filled: with grace, with love, with self-denial, semen and babies.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“What's dangerous in the hands of the multitudes, he said, with what may or may not have been irony, is safe enough for those whose motives are...
Beyond reproach, I said.
He nodded gravely. Impossible to tell whether or not he meant it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“But something had shifted, some balance. I felt shrunken, so that when he put his arms around me, gathering me up, I was as small as a doll. I felt love going forward without me.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Women can't add, he once said, jokingly. When I asked him what he meant, he said, For them, one and one and one and one don't make four. What do they make? I said, expecting five or three. Just one and one and one and one, he said.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“I admired my mother in some ways, although things between us were never easy. She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to vindicate her life for her, and the choices she'd made. I didn't want to live my life on her terms. I didn't want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas. We used to fight about that. I am not your justification for existence, I said to her once.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“He was not a monster, she said. People say he was a monster, but he was not one.
What could she have been thinking about? Not much, I guess; not back then, not at the time. She was thinking about how not to think. The times were abnormal. She took pride in her appearance. She did not believe he was a monster. He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation. A big child, she would have said to herself. Her heart would have melted, she'd have smoothed the hair back from his forehead, kissed him on the ear, and not just to et something out of him either. The instinct to soothe, to make it better. There there, she'd say as he awoke from a nightmare. Things are so hard for you. All this she believed, because otherwise how could she keep on living? She was very ordinary, under that beauty.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale