Chapter 34

• I try and imagine him in bed with his Wife and his Handmaid, fertilizing away like mad, like a rutting salmon, pretending to take no pleasure in it.
• He gazes over the room, and our soft voices die.
• “His voice is metal-coloured, horn shaped”
• for however many years we've been doing this.
• /Start them soon/ is the policy, /there's not a moment to be lost/
• They'll always have been in white, in groups of girls, they'll always have been silent.
• We've given more than we have taken away
• “Don’t you remember the terrible gap between the ones who could get a man easily and the ones who couldn’t?”
• “Think of the human misery.”
• “This way they all get a man, nobody’s left out.”
• “But look at the stats, my dear. Was it really worth it, falling in love?”
• This way they're protected, they can fufil their biological destinies in peace.
• they still unearth a few these days, dredge them up from underground, where they've been hiding, like moles.
• “There’s a little crying going on among them, some mutual patting and handholding, the ostentatious use of handkerchiefs”
• “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression”
• “What we’re aiming for, says Aunt Lydia, is a spirit of camaraderie among women. We must all pull together.”
• “There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There’s something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling.”
• “Ofglen says to me in her light, penetrating whisper: “We know you’re seeing him alone.””
• “But find out and tell us.” “Find out what?” I say. I feel rather than see the turning of her head. “Anything you can””