The Handmaid's Tale Quotes | Margaret Atwood

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Margaret Atwood (Author of The Handmaid’s Tale)

“A bachelor, a studio, those were the names for that kind of apartment. Separate entrance it would say in the ads, and that meant you could have sex, unobserved.” (The Handmaid’s Tale Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“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 day.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“At moments like this I envy those who have found a safe haven in which to bestow their hearts; or perhaps I envy them for having a heart to bestow. I often feel that I myself am without one, and possess in its stead merely a heart shaped stone.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“Better never means better for everyone… It always means worse, for some.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“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. 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 isn’t about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“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

“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

“By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you, believe you’re there, I believe you into being. Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are. So I will go on. So I will myself to go on.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“Every month there is a moon, gigantic, round, heavy, an omen. IT transits, pauses, continues on and passes out of sight, and I see despair coming towards me like famine. To feel that empty, again, again. I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“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.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“I am not your justification for existence.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“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
The Handmaid’s Tale

“I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“I feel angry. I’m not proud of myself for this, or for any of it. But then, that’s the point.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“I have them, these attacks of the past, like faintness, a wave sweeping over my head.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolor picture of blue irises, and why the window opens only partly and why the glass in it is shatter-proof. It isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“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.” (The Handmaid’s Tale Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“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.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“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. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, than at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish t were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one’s life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow. I’m sorry there is so much pain in this story. I’m sorry it’s in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“If I thought this would never happen again I would die. But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“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.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“In reduced circumstances the desire to live attaches itself to strange objects.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“It isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“It was like being in an elevator cut loose at the top. Falling, falling, and not knowing when you will hit.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because of 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.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“I’ve learned to do without a lot of things. If you have a lot of things, said Aunt Lydia, you get too attached to this material world and you forget about spiritual values.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“Knowing was a temptation. What you don’t know won’t tempt you.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“Live in the present, make the most of it, it’s all you’ve got.”
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

“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
The Handmaid’s Tale

“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”
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

“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
The Handmaid’s Tale

“That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. ”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“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.” (The Handmaid’s Tale Quotes)
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish, drying on sand.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“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
The Handmaid’s Tale

“The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway.”
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

“The stains on the mattress. Like dried flower petals. Not recent. Old love; there’s no other kind of love in this room now.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“The tension between her lack of control and her attempt to suppress it is horrible. It’s like a fart in church.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“The young ones are often the most dangerous, the most fanatical, the jumpiest with their guns. They haven’t yet learned about existence through time.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“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 being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“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 with.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“There’s always a black market, there’s always something that can be exchanged.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“There’s time to spare. This is one of the things I wasn’t prepared for – the amount of unfilled time, the long parentheses of nothing. Time as white sound.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“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 with some plague.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then. We were a society dying of too much choice.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I’m nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“To want is to have a weakness.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“We are a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“We are containers, it’s only the insides of our bodies that are important.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“We lived, as usual by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“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
The Handmaid’s Tale

“We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?”
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale

“What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.”
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