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9 quotes from The Handmaid’s Tale that will teach you about the world

As season 3 of the gripping TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale gets ever closer and publication of the sequel, The Testaments, approaches, we revisit 9 quotes from Marget Atwood’s classic novel that taught us important lessons about humanity.

1.    ‘Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.’

2.    ‘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.’

handmaids tale scene
Photo copyright Hulu

3.    ‘Better never means better for everyone. It always means worse, for some.’

4.     'He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, offkey, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak. How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.’
 

handmaids tale scene
Photo copyright Hulu

5.    ‘I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will . . . Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping.’

6. ‘That was one of the things they do. They force you to kill, within yourself.’
 

handmaids tale scene
Photo copyright Hulu

7.    ‘Freedom, like everything else, is relative.’

8.    ‘The problem wasn’t only with the women, he says. The main problem was with the men. . . You know what they were complaining about the most? Inability to feel. . . Do they feel now? I say. Yes, he says, looking at me. They do.’
 

handmaids tale scene
Photo copyright Hulu

9.    ‘You can't help what you feel but you can help how you behave.’

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