|
Quote
|
Character
|
Chapter
|
|
“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
|
Several different characters
|
(reoccurring) 9, 15, 24, 29,
35, 46
|
|
“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.”
|
Offred
|
2
|
|
“Now we walk along the same street, in red pairs, and no man shouts obscenities at us, speaks to us, touches us. No one whistles.”
|
Offred
|
3
|
|
"There is more than one kind of freedom. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from.”
|
Aunt Lydia
|
3
|
|
“We are fascinated, but also repelled. They seem undressed. It has taken so little time to change our minds, about things like this. . . Then I think: I used to dress like that. That was freedom.”
|
Offred
|
5
|
|
“We used to talk about buying a house like one of these, an old big house, fixing it up. We would have a garden, swings for the Children. We would have children... Such freedom now seems almost weightless.”
|
Offred
|
5
|
|
“I would like to steal something from this room. I would like to take some small thing, the scrolled ashtray... It would make me feel that I have power.”
|
Offred
|
14
|
|
“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.”
|
Offred
|
19
|
|
“Moira had power now, she’d been set loose, she’d set herself loose. She was now a loose woman.”
|
Offred
|
22
|
|
“Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy. Already we were losing the taste for freedom, already we were finding these walls secure.”
|
Offred
|
22
|
|
“One and one and one and one doesn’t equal four.
Each one remains unique.”
|
Offred
|
29
|
|
“Yet there’s an enticement in this thing, it carries with it the childish allure of dressing up. And it would be so flaunting, such a sneer at the Aunts, so sinful, so free. Freedom, like everything else, is relative.”
|
Offred
|
36
|
|
“And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.”
|
Offred
|
46
|