The Handmaid's Tale quotes

Question 1

“Some trade off, we still had our bodies. That was our fantasy”

Answer 1

Chapter 1

Question 2

“Thinking can hurt your chances and I intend to last”
“I am alive, I live, I breathe”

Answer 2

Chapter 2

Question 3

“A motherly figure, someone who would understand and protect me”

Answer 3

Chapter 3

Question 4

“He begins to whistle then he winks”
“I’m ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it is false news”
“They touch with their eyes and I move my hips a little”

Answer 4

Chapter 4

Question 5

“She has come to expose herself”
“Humongous, word of my childhood”
“We are fascinated, but also repelled. It has taken so little time to change our minds about these things”

Answer 5

Chapter 5

Question 6

“I think of her as a woman for whom every act is done for show”
“It makes the men look like dolls on which faces have not been painted; like scarecrows”

Answer 6

Chapter 6

Question 7

“Where should I go? Somewhere good”
“I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling . I need to believe it I must believe it”

Answer 7

Chapter 7

Question 8

“They can’t help it, she said God made them that way. He made you different. It’s up to you to make boundaries”
“She doesn’t make speeches anymore she has become speechless”

Answer 8

Chapter 8

Question 9

“I have them these attacks of the past”
“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum”

Answer 9

Chapter 9

Question 10

“The spectacles women used to make of themselves…no wonder those things used to happen”
“We lived in the gaps between the stories”
“Faith. It’s the only thing they’ve given me to read”

Answer 10

Chapter 10

Question 11

“There is no such thing as a sterile man any more, not officially”
“Knowledge of his power hangs nevertheless in the air”

Answer 11

Chapter 11

Question 12

“My nakedness is strange to me already. My body seems outdated”
“It is easier to think of her as dead”
“You must be a worthy vessel”
“My self is a thing I must now compose”

Answer 12

Chapter 12

Question 13

“Caged rats who’d give themselves electric shocks for something to do”
“We were on some kind of pill”
“For a moment, even though we knew what was being done to her we despised her”
“I have failed once again to fufil the expectations of others, which have become my own”

Answer 13

Chapter 13

Question 14

“It would make me feel like I have power”
“The commander is the head of the household. The house is what he holds”
“Any news, now, is better than none”
“I keep the knowledge of this name, like something hidden, some treasure I’ll come back to dig up”

Answer 14

Chapter 14

Question 15

“He looks like a museum guard…a semi-retired man…midwestern bank president”
“Blesses are the silent. I knew they made that up”
“They didn’t care what they did to your feet and hands”

Answer 15

Chapter 15

Question 16

“She hold my hands each of mine in each of hers. This is supposed to signify that we are one flesh, one being. What it really means is that she is controlled”
“Nor does rape cover it: nothing is going on here that I haven’t signed up for”
“Arousal and orgasm were no longer thought necessary”
“Which of us is it worse for her or me?”

Answer 16

Chapter 16

Question 17

“We can believe that we will be touched again, in love or desire”
“It’s so good to be touched by someone, to be felt so greedily, to feel so greedy”

Answer 17

Chapter 17

Question 18

“I feel like the world shatter”
“I too am a missing person”
“The body is so easily damaged so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is”
“I believe in all three versions of Luke at one and the same time”

Answer 18

Chapter 18

Question 19

“I dress not looking down”
“Once they drugged women, induced labour, cut them open , sewed them up. No more”

Answer 19

Chapter 19

Question 20

“It was from the bible or so they said”
“You are a transitional generation…they will accept their duties with willing hearts”
“FREEDOM TO CHOOSE. EVERY BABY A WANTED BABY. RECAPTURE OUR BODIES”
“A man is just a woman’s stratergy for making other woman”
“Don’t you know how many women’s lives, how many women’s bodies?”

Answer 20

Chapter 20

Question 21

“Sometimes you can find things out on birthdays”
“We grip each others hands we are no longer single”
“But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains is a shadow”
Repetition of the collective ‘we’ “Mother…you wanted a women’s culture. Well, now there is one”

Answer 21

Chapter 21

Question 22

“Here is a different story, a better one. This is the story of what happened to Moira. Part of it I can fill in myself”
“Moira had power now, she’d been set loose, she’d set herself loose”
“Nevertheless Moira was our fantasy”

Answer 22

Chapter 22

Question 23

“This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction”
“If I ever get out of her. Let’s stop there. I intend to get out”
“It’s an oasis of the forbidden”
“It’s a bargaining session things are about to be exchanged”
“I hold the glossy counters with their smooth edges, finger the letters. The feeling is voluptuous”
“He was so sad. That is a reconstruction too”

Answer 23

Chapter 23

Question 24

“The laughter boiling like lava in my throat”

Answer 24

Chapter 24

Question 25

“It was a look you’d give to an almost extinct animal at a zoo”
“I think I could get some of that as if indulging a child’s wish for bubble gum”

Answer 25

Chapter 25

Question 26

“He was no longer a thing to me”
“I now hadpower over her, of a kind, although she didn’t know me. And I enjoyed that”
“To him I’m no longer merely a useable body”

Answer 26

Chapter 26

Question 27

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays in the maze.”
“Somehow the wall is even more foreboding when it is empty”
“Hope is rising in me like sap in a tree. Blood in a wound. We have made an opening”

Answer 27

Chapter 27

Question 28

“There was a lot more music on the radio than usual, and free words”
“There were two men standing there , in uniforms, with machine guns. This was too theatrical to be true”
“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”
“We are not each other’s any more. Instead I am his”

Answer 28

Chapter 28

Question 29

“The pen between my fingers is sensuous, alive almost, I can feel its power”
“I would like to know…whatever there is to know..what is going on”

Answer 29

Chapter 29

Question 30

“Longsleeved even in the summer to keep us from the temptation of our own flesh”
“I am forgetting too much”
“What we prayed for was emptiness, so we would be worthy to be filled: with grace, with love, with self-denial, semen and babies”

Answer 30

Chapter 30

Question 31

“You don’t get hanged for being a jew you get hanged for being a noisy jew”
“The idea hangs between us, almost visible, almost palpable”

Answer 31

Chapter 31

Question 32

“His breath smells of alcohol, and I breathe it in like smoke. I admit I relish in it”
“Better never means better for everyone it always means worse for some”
“I feel buried”

Answer 32

Chapter 32

Question 33

“The eyes for that’s who the show is for”
“People will do anything than admit their life has no meaning”
“Moira slapped her in the face twice and back and forth”
“You can’t let her go slipping over the edge that stuff is catching”

Answer 33

Chapter 33

Question 34

“Even though some of them are no more than fourteen - start them soon is the policy”
“They can fulfill their biological destines in peace”
“All we’ve done is return things to nature’s norm”
“But you aren’t expected to love him. You’ll find out soon enough. Just do your duty in silence. When in doubt, you can lie on your back, you can look at the ceiling”

Answer 34

Chapter 34

Question 35

“I don’t want to be telling this story. I don’t have to tell it. I don’t have to tell it to myself or someone else”
“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme,”
“Luke was not the first man for me, and he might not have been the last. If he hadn’t been frozen that way. Stopped dead in time, in midair, among the trees back there, in the act of falling.”
“You’ll have to forgive me. I’m a refugee from the past, and like other refugees I go over the customs and habits of being I’ve left or been forced to leave behind me, and it all seems just as quaint, from here”
“Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away”

Answer 35

Chapter 36

Question 36

“Its like walking into the past”
“A movie about the same is not the same as the past”
“Perhaps he’s reached that state of intoxication which power is said to inspire, the state in which you believe you are indispensable and can therefore do anything, absolutely anything you feel like, anything at all.

Answer 36

Chapter 37

Question 37

“I can’t remember exactly because I have no way of writing it down. I’ve filled out as much as I can for her”
“I’ve tried to make it sound as much like her as I can. It’s away of keeping her alive”
“The toxic dumps and the radiation spills. They figure you’ve got three years maximum at those before your nose falls off”
“Here is what I’d like to tell I’d like to tell a story about how Moira escaped for good”

Answer 37

Chapter 38

Question 38

“I think of my mother sweeping up deadly toxins”
“I lie there like a dead bird”
“Fake it, I scream at myself inside my head you must remember how”

Answer 38

Chapter 39

Question 39

“His mouth is on me, his hands, I can’t wait and he’s moving already…I’m alive in my skin”
“No romance he says”
“It didn’t happen that way either I’m not sure how it happened exactly”

Answer 39

Chapter 40

Question 40

“I wished it showed me in a better light, if not happier then at least more active”
“I’m sorry its in fragments like a body caught from cross fire”
“He is fading day by day night by night”
“Ofglen is giving up on me…I don’t feel regret about this I feel relief”

Answer 40

Chapter 41

Question 41

“Women salvagings are less frequent there is no need for them. These days we are so well behaved”
“The crimes of others are a secret language to us”

Answer 41

Chapter 42

Question 42

“We jostle forward our heads turn from side to side our nostrils flare sniffing death”

Answer 42

Chapter 43

Question 43

“I never did know her real name. That is how you can get lost in a sea of names”

Answer 43

Chapter 44

Question 44

“The purple sequins fall slithering down the step like snakeskin”

Answer 44

Chapter 45

Question 45

“The world is full of weapons if you are looking for them”
“I am above him, looking down he is shrinking”

Answer 45

Chapter 46

Question 46

“Guesswork”
“There was little that was truly original or indigenous to Gilead: its genius was synthesis”
“The best and most effective way to control women for reproductive and other purposes was through women themselves…when power is scarce a little of it is tempting”
“Are there are any questions?”

Answer 46

Historical notes