Quotes from book
The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, originally published in 1985. It is set in a near-future New England, in a totalitarian state resembling a theonomy that overthrows the United States government. The novel focuses on the journey of the handmaid Offred. Her name derives from the possessive form "of Fred"; handmaids are forbidden to use their birth names and must use names derivative of those of the male, or master, whom they serve.

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“To want is to have a weakness.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood photo

“I feel like the word shatter.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood photo

“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 book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood photo

“You can think clearly only with your clothes on.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 24 (p. 143)
Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood photo

“Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. 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.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 7 (pp. 39-40)
Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood photo

“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 book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood photo

“The moon is a stone and the sky is full of deadly hardware, but oh God, how beautiful anyway.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood photo

“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 book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood photo

“These things you did were like prayers; you did them and you hoped they would save you. And for the most part they did. Or something did; you could tell by the fact that you were still alive.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood photo

“But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Chapter 13
Source: The Handmaid's Tale
Context: These pictures were supposed to be erotic, and I thought they were, at the time; but I see now what they were really about. They were paintings about suspended animation; about waiting, about objects not in use. They were paintings about boredom. But maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men.

Margaret Atwood photo

“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.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood photo

“At moments like this I envy those who have found a safe haven in which to bestow their hearts; or perhaps I envy them for having a heart to bestow. I often feel that I myself am without one, and possess in its stead merely a heart shaped stone.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood photo

“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 book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood photo

“No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as well as most.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood photo

“As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Historical Notes (p. 311)
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
Source: The Handmaid's Tale
Context: As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

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“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 book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale