Illegitimis non carborundum. Lat., Don't let the bastards grind you down.
— Joseph Stilwell
Reckoning Handmaids Tale quotations
Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion.
..Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.
Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.
We were the people who were not in the papers.
We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.
Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.
Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.
I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.
We are a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.
Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to.
This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.
Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?
We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?
Don't let the bastards grind you down.
I repeat this to myself but it conveys nothing. You might as well say, Don't let there be air; or Don't be. I suppose you could say that.
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.
we lived in the gaps between the stories
By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are. So I will go on. So I will myself to go on.
The way love feels is always only approximate.
I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.
By telling you anything at all I'm at least believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being.
The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil
How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.
Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were. It hasn’t happened this morning, either.
That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought.
You have to create an it, where none was before.