Handmaids Tale

• Hope/Despair - “And so I step up, into the darkness within, or else the light” 
• Hope/Despair- “Problems of Authentication in Reference to The Handmaid’s Tale” 
• Hope/Despair - “She appears to have been an educated woman, insofar as a graduate of any North American College” 
• Power and control - “Doubled I walk the street” 
• Power and control - “butter our skin to keep it soft, we can believe that we will some day get out… we have ceremonies of our own” 
• Power and control - “It cruises slowly along the street, as if looking for something: shark on the prowl” 
• Power and control - “Pretend not to see… But I cant help seeing.” 
• Power and control - “They pick him up and put him in the back of the van like a sack of mail.”
• Power and control - “He is demonstrating to me, his mastery of the world. He’s breaking the rules” 
• Power and control - “I need to take it seriously, this desire of his. It could be important, it could be a passport, it could be my downfall”
• Power and control - “Broken symbolism from the time before” 
• Power and control - “Gilead is within you… There are no lawyers any more, and the university is closed” 
• Offred - “thought must be rationed… thinking can hurt your chances and I intend to last”
• Offred - “The door of the room – not my room, I refuse to say my – is not locked.” 
• Offred - “Lay is always passive, I lie then” 
• Offred - “with my idea of her courage, live it through, act it out, when I myself do not” 
• Offred - “The night is mine, my own time” 
• Offred - “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”
• Offred - “We still had our bodies”
• Treatement of women - “I am a national resource” 
• Treatement of women - “My self is a thing I must now compose” / “I used to think my body was an instrument of pleasure”
• Treatement of women -“If your dog dies get another.” 
• Treatement of women -“It’s only the women who can’t, who remain stubbornly closed, damaged, defective.” 
• Treatement of women - “their eyes look too big to me, too dark and shimmering, their mouths too red, too wet” 
• Treatement of women -“his fingers encircling the ankle briefly, like a bracelet, where the tattoo is, a braille that he can read a cattle brand. It means ownership.”
• Moira - “Moira had power now, she’d been set loose, she’d set herself loose. She was now a loose woman.” 
• Moira - “She was lava beneath the crust of daily life”
• Ofglen - “Hope is rising in me like sap in a tree. Blood in a wound. We have made an opening”  
• Ofglen - “She has died that I may live. I will mourn later” 
• Ofglen - “Things are back to normal. How can I call this normal”