Chapter 35

• “Now there’s a space to be filled (…) and a time also, a space-time”
• An invalid, one who has been invalidated. No valid passport. No exit.
• “I was watching two soldiers in the unfamiliar uniforms that were beginning, by then, to be familiar”
• “One of them was watching a flock of birds, gulls, lifting and eddying and landing on the bridge railing beyond.”
• “I don’t want to be telling this story.

  [...] I don't have to tell it."
• I could withdraw. It's possible to go so far in, so far down and back, they could never get you out.

  /Nolite te bastardes carborundorum./ Fat lot of good it did for her.

  Why fight?

  
  

  That will never do.
• “Falling in love (…) if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that.”
• “we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.”
• “you’d remember the stories you’d read, in the newspapers, about women who had been found (…) in ditches or forests or refrigerators”
• “There were places you didn’t want to walk, precautions you took that had to do with locks on windows and doors, drawing the curtains, leaving on the lights. These things you did were like prayers.”
• “he was, the loved. One. Is, I say, Is, is, only two letters, you stupid shit, can’t you manage to remember it, even a short word like that?”
• “You’ll have to forgive me. I’m a refugee from the past”
• “marooned in the twentieth century”
• “no Handmaid’s though. From the point of view of future history, this kind, we’ll be invisible.”
• Weeping is what it is, not crying. I sit in this chair and ooze like a sponge
• “Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I’m nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child near the water.”
• “Still, I can’t bear it, to have been erased like that. Better she’d brought me nothing.”
• I have been obliterated for her. I am only a shadow now,[…]. A shadow of a shadow, as dead mothers become.
• as if I'm lacking manual skills or teeth. I have both, however. That is why i am not allowed a knife.