The Handmaid's Tale (The Handmaid’s Tale)

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of

time travellers, anachronisms.

If she wants to, my mother said; she had a way of talking about me to others as if I couldn’t hear.

Her hands rest on it as if to defend it, or as if they’re gathering something from it, warmth and strength.

an offering and an invitation,

But who can remember pain, once it’s over? All that remains of it is a shadow, not in the mind even, in the flesh.

hierarchical society – the ruling class monopolizes valuable things, so