Who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow. Not in the mind even, in the flesh. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.
Wear the dress. Pull the strings.[to Serena]
We get so comfortable with walls. It doesn’t even take that long. Wear the red dress, wear the wings, shut your mouth, be a good girl. Roll over and spread your legs. Yes, ma’am. May the Lord open.
There’s a window with white curtains, and the glass is shatterproof. But it isn’t running away they’re afraid of. A Handmaid wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes. The ones you can open in yourself given a cutting edge. Or a twisted sheet and a chandelier.
The perfect gift. A girl trapped in a box. She only dances when someone else opens the lid, when someone else winds her up. If this is a story I’m telling, I must be telling it to someone. There’s always someone, even when there is no one. I will not be that girl in the box.
Stay in Gilead long enough and it starts to eat you from the inside out. That’s one of the things they do. They force you to kill, within yourself.
I’m sorry there is so much pain in this story. I’m sorry it’s in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there’s nothing I can do to change it. I’ve tried to put some of the good things in as well.[to her baby]
Gilead doesn’t care about children. Gilead cares about power.[to June]
Every love story is a tragedy if you wait long enough.
You have to let the rabble-rousers blow off a little steam or they’ll smash everything to bits.
Whether this is my end or a new beginning, I have no way of knowing. I have given myself over into the hands of strangers. I have no choice. It can’t be helped. And so I step up, into the darkness within or else the light.
There was an Offred before me. She helped me find my way out. She is dead. She is alive. She is me. We are Handmaids. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, b**ches.
