The Handmaid's Tale Quotes (Season 1)

Now I’m awake to the world. I was asleep before. That’s how we let it happen. When they slaughtered Congress, we didn’t wake up. When they blamed terrorists and suspended the Constitution, we didn’t wake up then either. They said it would be temporary. Nothing changes instantaneously. In a gradually heating bathtub, you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.

Love isn’t real. It was never anything more than lust with a good marketing campaign.

It’s their own fault. They should have never given us uniforms if they didn’t want us to be an army.

Sometimes we have to do what is best for everyone, not what is fair.

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.

Every love story is a tragedy if you wait long enough.

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.

Now, there has to be an “us.” Because, now, there is a “them.”

Better never means better for everyone. It always means worse for some.

To want is to have a weakness.