Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale (1985)

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I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.

Margaret Atwood
Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Nobody said when.

Margaret Atwood
I'm a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I've left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here, and I am just as obsessive about it.

Margaret Atwood
Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

Margaret Atwood
I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.

Margaret Atwood
There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt.

Margaret Atwood
His mouth is on me, his hands, I can't wait and he's moving, already, love, it's been so long, I'm alive in my skin, again, arms around him, falling and water softly everywhere, never-ending.

Margaret Atwood
A movie about the past is not the same as the past.

Margaret Atwood
Modesty is invisibility... Never forget it. To be seen - to be seen - is to be... penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable.

Margaret Atwood
I look up at the ceiling, tracing the foliage of the wreath. Today it makes me think of a hat, the large-brimmed hats women used to wear at some period during the old days: hats like enormous halos, festooned with fruit and flowers, and the feathers of exotic birds; hats like an idea of paradise, floating just above the head, a thought solidified.

Margaret Atwood
And sometimes it happened, for a time. 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 have been evasive about it, at the time.

Margaret Atwood
Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips.

Margaret Atwood
The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil

Margaret Atwood
I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I'd turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.

Margaret Atwood
Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else.
Even when there is no one.

Margaret Atwood
Now we come to forgiveness. Don't worry about forgiving me right now. There are more important things. For instance: keep the others safe, if they are safe. Don't let them suffer too much. If they have to die, let it be fast. You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.

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

Margaret Atwood
Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy.

Margaret Atwood
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.

Margaret Atwood
He stops, looks up at this window, and I can see the white oblong of his face. We look at each other. I have no rose to toss, he has no lute. But it's the same kind of hunger.

Margaret Atwood
Is anything wrong, dear? the old joke went. No, why? You moved. Just don't move.

Margaret Atwood
I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing…. I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.

Margaret Atwood
Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

Margaret Atwood
You can mean more than one. You can mean thousands. I'm not in any immediate danger, I'll say to you. I'll pretend you can hear me. But it's no good, because I know you can't.

Margaret Atwood
One and one and one and one doesn't equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.

Margaret Atwood
Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there's something dead about it, something deserted.

Margaret Atwood
Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.

Margaret Atwood
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. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.

Margaret Atwood
As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

Margaret Atwood
I'll take care of it, Luke said. And because he said it instead of her, I knew he meant kill. That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real.

Margaret Atwood