The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
“Men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.”
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Notable Quotes of Quotable Notes : That is the question 😊
“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.”
“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.”
“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
“Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you.”
“If you don't like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves. And so we would change for the man, for another one. Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.”
“These days I script whole fights, in my head, and the reconciliations afterwards, too.”
“The stains on the mattress. Like dried flower petals. Not recent. Old love; there's no other kind of love in this room now.
“I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will. I could make it run, push buttons, of one sort or another, make things happen. There were limits but my body was nevertheless lithe, single, solid, one with me.
Now the flesh arranges it self differently.”
“I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable.”
“Freedom, like everything else, is relative.”
“I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed”
“I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor.”
“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.”
“Humanity is so adaptable . Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.”
“I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own.”
“A story is like a letter. Dear You, I'll say. Just you, without a name. Attaching a name attaches you to the world of fact, which is riskier, more hazardous: who knows what the chances are out there, of survival, yours? I will say you, you, like an old love song. 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.”
“This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone”
What confronts us, now the excitement's over, is our own failure.”
“I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people.”
“My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body.”
“There is more than one kind of freedom. Freedom to and freedom from. In the day of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.”
“The pen between my fingers is sensuous, alive almost, I can feel its power, the power of the words it contains.”
“Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. [...] Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it.”
“I wait. 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.”
About The Handmaid’s Tale
The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, published in 1985. It is set in a near-future New England, in a strongly patriarchal, totalitarian theonomic state, known as Republic of Gilead, that has overthrown the United States government. The central character and narrator is a woman named Offred, one of the group known as "handmaids", who are forcibly assigned to produce children for the "commanders" – the ruling class of men.
The novel explores themes of subjugated women in a patriarchal society and the various means by which they resist and attempt to gain individuality and independence
The Handmaid's Tale won the 1985 Governor General's Award and the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987; it was also nominated for the 1986 Nebula Award, the 1986 Booker Prize, and the 1987 Prometheus Award.