The Handmaid’s Tale is a 1985 dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood.
It takes place in a near-future New England where many people are slaves and fertile women are compelled to have children in a totalitarian society.
Here are some of the top quotes from The Handmaid’s Tale novel.
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The Handmaid’s Tale Quotes by Margaret Atwood
“We lived, as usual by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“You can’t help what you feel, but you can help how you behave.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“I stand on the corner, pretending I am a tree.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I’d turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.” ~ Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale.
“To want is to have a weakness.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.” ~ Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale.
“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
Other Books Quotes: The Little Prince Quotes by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Night Quotes by Elie Wiesel
Quotes from The Handmaid’s Tale
“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.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings…but there’s something dead about it, something deserted.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“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.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“I am not your justification for existence.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn’t be that hard.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“I feel like the word shatter.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
Famous The Handmaid’s Tale Quotes
“Modesty is invisibility…Never forget it. To be seen—to be seen—is to be…penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“It isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.” ~ Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale.
Top The Handmaid’s Tale Quotes
“I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“One and one and one and one doesn’t equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other. They cannot replace each other.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“If I thought this would never happen again I would die. But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“Sanity is a valuable possesion; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“There’s always something to occupy the inquiring mind.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“Knowing was a temptation. What you don’t know won’t tempt you.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
Powerful The Handmaid’s Tale Quotes
“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.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“Maybe the life I think I’m living is a paranoid delusion…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.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you’ve been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Faith is only a word, embroidered.” ~ Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale.
“You can think clearly only with your clothes on.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
Profound The Handmaid’s Tale Quotes
“The night is mine, my own time, to do with it as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don’t move. As long as I lie still. The difference between lie and lay. Lay is always passive.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?” ~ Margaret atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale.
“Better never means better for everyone… It always means worse, for some.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you, I believe you’re there, I believe you into being.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
“Faith is only a word, embroidered.” ~ Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale).
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