When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
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The Handmaid's Tale
From the bestselling author of Alias Grace and the MaddAddam trilogy, here is the #1 New York Times bestseller and seminal work of speculative fiction from the Booker Prize-winning author. Now a Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss,
Characters
But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.
You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.
Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
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 stories.
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.
But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.
They only show us victories, never defeats. Who wants bad news? Possibly he's an actor.
The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.
Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and…
Careless. I was careless in those rooms. I could lift the telephone and food would appear on a tray, food I had chosen. Food that was bad for me, no doubt, and drink too. There were bibles in the dresser drawers put there by some charitable society, though probably no one read them very much.
Someone else planted a bomb in her car but it went off too early. Though some people said she'd put the bomb in her own car for sympathy. That's how hot things were getting.
These men, we've been told, are like war criminals. It's no excuse that what they did was legal at the time, their crimes are retroactive. They have committed atrocities and must be made into examples for the rest. Though this is hardly needed, no woman in her right mind these days would seek to pre…
'Modesty is invisibility,' said Aunt Lydia. 'Never forget it. To be seen, to be SEEN, is to be,' her voice trembled, 'Penetrated. What you must be, girls, is impenetrable.'
I try not to think too much, like other things now, thought must be rationed.
You can't help what you feel, but you can help how you behave.
To want is to have a weakness.
I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.
I am not your justification for existence.