The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood
Top 10 Best Quotes
“They should have never given us uniforms if they didn't want us to be an army.”
“We were a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.”
“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. It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.”
“It's an event, a small defiance of rule, so small as to be undetectable, but such moments are the rewards I hold out for myself, like the candy I hoarded, as a child, at the back of a drawer. Such moments are possibilities, tiny peepholes.”
“Each twinge, each murmur of slight pain, ripples of sloughed-off matter, swellings and diminishings of tissue, the droolings of the flesh, these are signs, these are the things I need to know about. Each month I watch for blood, fearfully, for when it comes it means failure. I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own.”
“You can see it in her eyes: I am not there. But she exists, in her white dress. She grows and lives. Isn't that a good thing? A blessing? Still, I can't bear it, to have been erased like that.”
“I don't sing like this often. It makes my throat hurt.”
“I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather no shadow unless there is also light.”
“You were a wanted child, God knows, she would say at other moments, lingering over the photo albums in which she had me framed; these albums were thick with babies, but my replicas thinned out as I grew older, as if the population of my duplicates had been hit by some plague. She would say this a little regretfully, as though I hadn't turned out entirely as she'd expected. 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 badly by one another, we did as well as most. I wish she were here, so I could tell her I finally know this.”
“Whether this is my end or a new beginning I have no way of knowing: I have given myself over into the hands of strangers, because it can't be helped.”
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Book Keywords:
failure, hurt, light, sorrow, resistance, betrayal, life, shadow, sing, uniforms, menstruation, cry, army, pregnancy
