1- “Better never means better for everyone… It always means worse, for some.”
2- “Freedom, like everything else, is relative.”
3- “There’s always something to occupy the inquiring mind.”
4- Offred : “In reduced circumstances the desire to live attaches itself to strange object”
5- “I am not your justification for existence.”
6- “The world is full of weapons if you’re looking for them.”
7- Offred : “It was true, I took too much for granted; I trusted fate, back then”
8- “Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
9- “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
10- Offred : “How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. ”
11- “Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.”
12- “Dear God, I think, I will do anything you like. Now that you’ve let me off, I’ll obliterate myself, if that is what you really want; I’ll empty myself, truly, become a chalice. I’ll give up Nick, I’ll forget about the others, I’ll stop complaining. I’ll accept my lot. I’ll sacrifice. I’ll repent. I’ll abdicate. I’ll renounce.”
13- Aunt , Lydia : “There is more than one kind of freedom … Freedom to and freedom from.”
14- ‘The problem wasn’t only with the women, he says. The main problem was with the men. . . You know what they were complaining about the most? Inability to feel. . . Do they feel now? I say. Yes, he says, looking at me. They do.’
15- “Agreed to it right away, really she didn’t care, anything with two legs and a good you-know-what was fine with her. They aren’t squeamish, they don’t have the same feelings we do.”
16- “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.”
17- ‘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.
18- Offred : “if it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending”
19- “You can’t help what you feel but you can help how you behave.”
20- 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”
21- “If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending…
But if it’s a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone.
You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else. Even when there is no one.”
22- “It makes me feel more in control, as if there is a choice, a decision that could be made one way or the other.”
23- The Commander : “Better never means better for everyone … It always means worse, for some.”
24- “I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.”
25- “When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
26- Offred : There’s always a black market, there’s always something that can be exchanged.
27- “You can think clearly only with your clothes on.”
28- “We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?”
29- “Give me children, or else I die. Am I in God’s stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? Behold my maid Bilhah. She shall bear fruit upon my knees, that I may also have children by her.”
30- I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will . . . Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping.’
31- “You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.”