Quotes of Note: Margaret Atwood, "The Handmaid's Tale" I

Quotes of note from The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood:

(Page numbers gleaned from the 1998 Anchor Books trade paperback.)

"It's good to have small goals that can be easily attained." (p. 13)

"The threshold of a new house is a lonely place." (p. 14)

"I'm ravenous for news, any kind of news; even if it's false news, it must mean something." (p. 20)

"The young ones are often the most dangerous... . They haven't yet learned about existence through time." (p. 20)

"Everything is meant." (p. 21)

"There are no lawyers anymore, and the university is closed." (p. 23)

"There is more than one kind of freedom... . Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from." (p. 24)

"We were a society dying ... of too much choice." (p. 25)

"All children are wanted now, but not by everyone." (p. 26)

"What I feel is that I must not feel." (p. 33)

"Those who can believe that ... stories are only stories have a better chance. If it's a story I'm telling, then I have control over the ending." (p. 39)

"How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word." (p. 46)

"The future is in your hands... ." (p. 47)

"Nolite te bastardes carborundorum." (p. 52)

"Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it." (p. 56)

"Nothing changes instantaneously." (p. 56)

"[M]aybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men." (p. 69)

"[M]inor discomforts are instructive." (p. 79)

"[F]lowers ... [a]re the genital organs of plants." (p. 82)

"Any news, now, is better than none." (p. 82)

"[Y]our name is like your telephone number, useful only to others... ." (p. 84)

"You can't expect a child to lie convincingly." (p. 85)

"For our purposes your feet and your hands are not essential." (p. 91)

"Arousal and orgasm are no longer thought necessary; they would be a symptom of frivolity merely, like jazz garters or beauty spots: superfluous distractions for the light-minded." (p. 94)

"[N]obody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from." (p. 103)

"[T]here must be a resistance, a government in exile. Someone must be out there, taking care of things." (p. 105)

"Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion." (p. 109)

"The greater the risk the greater the glory." (p. 113)

"A thing is valued ... only if it is rare and hard to get." (p. 114)