The Handmaid's Tale key quotes

• “Better never means better for everyone [...] It always means worse, for some.”
• "Change, we were sure, was for the better always."
• "Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it."
• "Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it."
• "We were a society dying [...] of too much choice."
• "But look at the stats, my dear. Was it really worth it, falling in love?"
• “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.”
• “We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?”
• “You can’t help what you feel, but you can help how you behave.”
• “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.”
• “Live in the present, make the most of it, it’s all you’ve got.”
• “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.”
• “We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
• “When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
• “A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
• “I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.”
• “Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.”
• “Knowing was a temptation. What you don’t know won’t tempt you.”
• “But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.”
• “I am not your justification for existence.”