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