quotes Flashcards

Question

F - Monster and nature

Answer 1

'I, like the arch fiend, bore a hell within me; and, finding myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin.' 'The pleasant sunshine, and the pure air of day, restored me to some degree of tranquillity' 'I saw, with surprise and grief, the leaves decay and fall, and nature again assume the barren and bleak appearance it had worn when I first beheld the woods and the lovely moon' 'my chief delights were the sight of the flowers, the birds, and all the gay apparel of summer' 'The cold stars shone in mockery’

Answer 2

'Morning, dismal and wet’ ‘Black and comfortless sky’ 'patterned dismally' 'my spirits were elevated by the enchanting appearance of nature' 'Oh! Stars and clouds and winds, ye are all about to mock me; if ye really pity me, crush sensation and memory; let me become as naught; but if not, depart, depart, and leave me in darkness.' 'Dear mountains! my own beautiful lake! how do you welcome your wanderer? Your summits are clear; the sky and lake are blue and placid. Is this to prognosticate peace, or to mock at my unhappiness?' 'I was tempted to plunge in the silent lake' 'The rain fell in torrents' - after Elizabeth’s death to represent overpouring emotions

Answer 3

'Evil thenceforth became my good'

Answer 4

'I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!—Great God!’ ‘breathless horror and disgust filled my heart’

Answer 5

‘I devote myself, either in my life or death, to his destruction’ ‘Revenge kept me alive’

Answer 6

‘the shades of my murdered friends heard and approved my devotion’ ‘The furies possessed me’

Answer 7

'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 badly by one another, we did as well as most.'

Answer 8

'That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real. So that’s how they do it, I thought. I seemed never to have known that before.'

Answer 9

‘The world was to me a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own’ - An early hint at Victor's dangerous ambition, and his naïve belief that man is powerful and wise enough to comprehend nature

Answer 10

‘I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit’

Answer 11

'Four digits and an eye, a passport in reverse'

Answer 12

'worthy vessel' 'breeding purposes' 'I am a national resource' 'we are containers, it's only the inside of our bodies that are important' 'two-legged wombs'

Answer 13

'give me children or else I die'

Answer 14

'everything except the wings around my face is red: the color of blood, which defines us' 'the white wings too are prescribed issue; they are to keep us from seeing, but also from being seen'

Answer 15

'I tell him my real name, therefore I am known' 'this is how you get lost, in a sea of names'

Answer 16

'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'

Answer 17

'I wish to be totally clean, germless, without bacteria, like the surface of the moon'

Answer 18

'we were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces on the edges of print'

Answer 19

‘The fact is that I no longer want to leave, escape, cross the border to freedom. I want to be here, with Nick, where I can get at him.’

Answer 20

'To be seen is to be penetrated'

Answer 21

'we still had our bodies'

Answer 22

'I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object'

Answer 23

'I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely'

Answer 24

'waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

Answer 25

'in this house we all envy each other something' 'I envy the Commander's Wife her knitting'

Answer 26

'as long as we do this, butter our skin to keep it soft, we can believe that we will some day get out, that we will be touched again, in love or desire. We have ceremonies of our own, private ones'

Answer 27

'nolite te bastardes corborundorum'

Answer 28

'I'm ravenous for news [...] even if it's false news, it must mean something'

Answer 29

'there's always a black market, there's always something that can be exchanged'

Answer 30

'she wanted me to feel that I could not come into the house unless she said so'

Answer 31

'they've removed anything you could tie a rope to' 'it only opens partly' 'the glass is shatterproof'

Answer 32

'He could fake the tests, report me for cancer, for infertility, have me shipped off to the Colonies with the Unwomen'

Answer 33

'forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.'

Answer 34

'I now had power over her [...] I enjoyed it a lot'

Answer 35

'May the Lord open' 'Blessed be the fruit' 'Under his Eye'

Answer 36

'The Bible is kept locked up, the way people once kept tea locked up, so the servants wouldn’t steal it. It is an incendiary device: who knows what we’d make of it, if we ever got our hands on it?' 'GOD IS A NATIONAL RESOURCE' ‘He has something we don’t have, he has the word’

Answer 37

'Oh God. It’s no joke. Oh God oh God. How can I keep on living?'

Answer 38

'I feel very unreal, talking to You like this. I feel as if I’m talking to a wall. I wish You’d answer. I feel so alone.'

Answer 39

‘Where should I go?' ‘Here is what I believe’ ‘I tell, therefore you are.’ 'I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it.' 'This is a reconstruction' 'If it's only a story, it becomes less frightening' 'it's a way of keeping her alive' - Moira

Answer 40

'the Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge'

Answer 41

'Janine, inflated but reduced, shorn of her former name' 'she'd roll over for anyone' 'Ofwarren, formerly that whiny bitch Janine'

Answer 42

'Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it'

Answer 43

'Ordinary [...] is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary'

Answer 44

'There is more than one kind of freedom [...] Freedom to and freedom from'

Answer 45

'No one dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from' 'what did we overlook?' 'love' 'it was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself'

Answer 46

'The night is mine, my own time'

Answer 47

'All flesh is weak. All flesh is grass, I corrected her in my head. They can’t help it, she said, God made them that way but He did not make you that way. He made you different. It’s up to you to set the boundaries. Later you will be thanked.'

Answer 48

'he makes me hungry' 'I hunger to commit the act of touch' 'The smell of nail polish has made me hungry.' 'Death makes me hungry'

Answer 49

‘She was snipping off the seed pods with a pair of shears’ ‘the swelling genitalia of the flowers’ ‘Saint Serena, on her knees, doing penance. I often amused myself this way, with small mean-minded bitter jokes about her’ ‘What I coveted was the shears’ 'Then we had the irises, [...] so female in shape it was a surprise they’d not long since been rooted out.’ ‘Whatever is silenced will clamour to be heard, though silently’ ‘a Tennyson garden’

Answer 50

'“Tonight I have a little surprise for you,” he says. He laughs; it’s more like a snigger. I notice that everything this evening is little. He wishes to diminish things, myself included.'

Answer 51

'The Marthas are not supposed to fraternise with us' 'Why tempt her to friendship?' 'How I used to despise such talk. Now I long for it. At least it was talk. An exchange, of sorts.' 'I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people.'

Answer 52

'a chair, sunlight, flowers: these are not to be dismissed' 'I once had a garden' 'Sometimes the Commander’s Wife has a chair brought out, and just sits in it, in her garden. From a distance it looks like peace.' 'I felt as if a protective arm were being withdrawn'

Answer 53

'better never means better for everyone, it always means worse, for some' - Commander, justifying Gilead

Answer 54

'there was nothing for them to do with women' 'the sex was too easy. Anyone could just buy it' 'men were turning off on sex' 'they were turning off on marriage'

Answer 55

'blessed are the meek. She didn't go on to say anything about inheriting the earth'

Answer 56

'my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave' 'I, the true murderer' - when visiting Justine

Answer 57

‘he too is illegal, here, with me, he can’t give me away’ ‘I glide with Ofglen along the sidewalk; the pair of us, and in front of us another pair, and across the street another' 'Siamese twins' ‘She wants it all right, that baby. I see the two of us, a blue shape, a red shape, in the brief glass eye of the mirror’ - SJ takes her to have sex with Nick, universal need for a child

Answer 58

'race of devils' 'she might becom ten thousand times more malignant than her mate'

Answer 59

'I will go to the vast wilds of South America. My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid, to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment. [...] We shall make our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as on man, and will ripen our food. The picture I present to you is peaceful and human'

Answer 60

‘Our nostrils flare, sniffing death’ - animalistic language, mob violence ‘He has become an it’ - dehumanised 'Death makes me hungry. [...] I want to go to bed, make love, right now. I think of the word relish. I could eat a horse.’

Answer 61

'I’ve tried to put some of the good things in as well. Flowers, for instance, because where would we be without them?'

Answer 62

'for women only' ‘A collective murmur goes up from us. The crimes of others are a secret language among us. Through them we show ourselves what we might be capable of, after all.’ Three women are hanged, ‘two Handmaids, one Wife’ ‘placed my hand on my heart to show my unity with the Salvagers and my consent, and my complicity in the death of this woman’ ‘Flightless birds, wrecked angels’

Answer 63

‘[language is] a godlike science and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it’

Answer 64

'From each, says the slogan, according to her ability; to each according to his needs'

Answer 65

'He has something we don’t have, he has the word. How we squandered it, once.'

Answer 66

'they don't want us to hear what the unwomen are saying'

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