Chapter 20

• “ham, cheese, oranges – they have oranges! –”
• “I can hear the chanting of the women who are already there”
• “The Commander, of course, is nowhere in sight. (…) Probably he’s figuring out when his promotion is likely to be announced, if all goes well.”
• “Not every Commander has a Handmaid: some of their Wives have children. From each according to her ability; to each according to his needs”
• “It was from the Bible, or so they said.”
• “You are a transitional generation”
• “Sometimes the movie she showed would be an old porno film, from the seventies or eighties. Women kneeling, sucking penises or guns (…) women being raped, beaten up, killed (…) her stomach slit open and her intestines pulled out.”
• They will accept their duties with willing hearts.

  She did not say: Because they will have no memories, of any other way.

  She said: Because they won't want things they can't have.
• “They don’t play the soundtrack, on movies like these, though they do on the porno films (…) they don’t want us to hear what the Unwomen are saying.”
• “The camera pans up and we see the writing, in paint on what must have been a bedsheet: TAKE BACK THE NIGHT.” [...] 'FREEDOM TO CHOOSE. EVERY BABY A WANTED BABY. RECAPTURE OUR BODIES. DO YOU BELIEVE A WOMEN'S PLACE IS ON THE KITCHEN TABLE?'
• “I had you when I was thirty seven, my mother said. It was a risk, you could have been deformed or something.”
• “A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women (…) That was the way she talked, even in front of Luke. He didn’t mind, he teased her by pretending to be macho, he’d tell her women were incapable of abstract thought and she’d have another drink and grin at him.”
• “You young people don’t appreciate things, she’d say.”
• “I want her back. I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.”
• The rest of the women sit cross-legged on the rug
• Consider the alternatives, said Aunt Lydia. You see what things used to be like? That was what they thought of women, then.
• “I didn’t want to live my life on her terms. I didn't want to be the model offspring, the incarnation of her ideas. [...] I am not the justification for existence, I said to her once'