1. Home
    2.  › 
  2. TV Quotes
    3.  › 
  3. The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale Quotes

“Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Faith, strength, Inspirational
“They only show us victories, never defeats. Who wants bad news? Possibly he's an actor.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Bad News, Defeats, Propaganda
“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.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: News, Unreal
“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 the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Social Change, Political Injustice, Being Silent
“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.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: hotel room, hotels, Decadence
“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.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Unrest, Politics
“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 prevent a birth, should she be so lucky to conceive.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Abortion, Criminals, Pro-Choice, Pro-Life
“'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.'”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Girls, Women, feminism, Modesty
“I try not to think too much, like other things now, thought must be rationed.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Oppression, Women, Totalitarianism
“You can't help what you feel, but you can help how you behave.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Behavior, Feelings, Emotion, Psychology, Mental Health, Self-Control
“To want is to have a weakness.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Wanting, Desire, Weakness, Lust
“I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Wanting, Desire, Change, Nostalgia
“We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Future, Change, Yearning
“I am not your justification for existence.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Existence, justification, Love, Idealism, Idealizing Someone
“Forgiveness 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
Tagged: forgiveness, Power
“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
Tagged: Perspective, Life, Change
“When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: The Past, Nostalgia, Truth, Perception, Memory
“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
Tagged: Freedom, Stories, People, Life
“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.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Pain, Memory, Remembering
“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Igorance, Ignoring
“We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: first lines of books
“You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.”
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Tagged: Jealousy, Desire
loading next page...