Quotes Flashcards
Learn Handmaids quotes so that you don't waste time looking them up <3
thought
Chapter 2
“thought must be rationed. There’s a lot that doesn’t bear thinking about. Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last.”
red
chapter 2
“red: the colour of blood, which defines us”
mirror and wings
Chapter 2
“there remains a mirror, on the hall wall. If I turn my head so that the white wings framing my face direct my vision towards it, I can see it as I go down the stairs, round, convex, a pier glass, like the eye of a fish, and myself in it like a distorted shadow, a parody of something, some fairy tale figure in a red cloak”
touch
chapter 2
“I hunger to commit the act of touch”
sororize
chapter 2
“no corresponding word which meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be he said
like suits
chapter 9
Though at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.
FAITH
chapter 10
I can spend minutes, tens of minutes, running my eyes over the print: FAITH. It’s the only thing they’ve given me to read.
a made thing
chapter 12
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.
turn our backs
chapter 6
“Now we turn our backs on the church and there is the thing we’ve in truth come to see: the Wall.”
date rape
chapter 7
“What’s your paper on? I just did one on date rape.
Date rape, I said. You’re so trendy. It sounds like some kind of dessert. Date rapé.”
extravagantly
chapter 7
“On the floor of the room there were books, open face down, this way and that, extravagantly.”
story
chapter 7
“I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling… It isn’t a story I’m telling.”
narrative voice coming out of past
fruitful
Chapter 11
“I almost gasp: he’s said a forbidden word. Sterile. There is no such thing as a sterile man anymore, not officially. There are only women who are fruitful and women who are barren, that’s the law.”
when I’m in the bath
chapter 12
“This is the age she is when I’m in the bath. She comes back to me at different ages.”
flowers
chapter 14
“They’re the genital organs of plants. I read that somewhere, once.”
