The Handmaid's Tale: Chapters 18–24

He made contact with the others, there must be a resistance, a government in exile. Someone must be out there, taking care of things. I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light. There must be a resistance, or where do all the criminals come from, on the television?

I sit in the chair and think about the word chair. It can also mean the leader of a meeting. It can also mean a mode of execution. It is the first syllable in charity. It is the French word for flesh. None of these facts has any connection with the others.
These are the kinds of litanies I use, to compose myself.

It’s a barren landscape, yet perfect; it’s the sort of desert the saints went into, so their minds would not be distracted by profusion.

Deathwatch. That’s a kind of beetle, it buries carrion.

These habits of former times appear to me now lavish, decadent almost...

M. loves G. 1972. This carving, done with a pencil dug many times into the worn varnish of the desk, has the pathos of all vanished civilizations.

It is hard when men revile you.

I liked watching these people when they were happy, not when they were miserable, starving, emaciated, straining themselves to death over some simple thing, the digging of a well, the irrigation of land, problems the civilized nations had long ago solved.

History will absolve me.

She thought all Janine’s sniveling and repentance meant something, she thought Janine had been broken, she thought Janine was a true believer.

But by that time Janine was like a puppy that’s been kicked too often, by too many people, at random: she’d roll over for anyone, she’d tell anything, just for a moment of approbation.

In any case she didn’t kill or mutilate Aunt Elizabeth, who a few days later, after she’d recovered from her seven hours behind the furnace and presumably from the interrogation—for the possibility of collusion would not have been ruled out, by the Aunts or by anyone else—was back in operation at the Center.

Moira didn’t look much like Aunt Elizabeth, even with the brown wimple in place, but her stiff-backed posture was apparently enough to convince the Angels on guard, who never looked at any of us very closely, even and perhaps especially the Aunts; because Moira marched straight out the front door, with the bearing of a person who knew where she was going; was saluted, presented Aunt Elizabeth’s pass, which they didn’t bother to check, because who would affront an Aunt in that way.

I hold the glossy counters with their smooth edges, finger the letters. The feeling is voluptuous. This is freedom, an eyeblink of it. Limp, I spell. Gorge. What a luxury.

Aunt Lydia did not actually say this, but it was implicit in everything she did say.