135+ (BEST) Handmaid’s Tale Quotes All-Time Favourite

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Handmaid’s Tale Quotes is to teach you something new and extraordinary in your life. Here we collected 135+ best quotes from the novel.

Get access to the best Quotes from Handmaid’s Tale written by Margaret Atwood.

“If you’ve heard anything about The Handmaid’s Tale, it’s probably how terrifying and horrifying it is. And yes, the plot is pretty dystopian. But much like a book can be scary but still contain plenty of profound quotes, this show delivers the same.

Handmaid’s Tale Quotes

There are many great quotes from The Handmaid’s Tale. Here are a few of my favorites that I think everyone should be familiar with.

This post contains the most famous quotes from the novel The Handmaid’s Tale.

“But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.”

Humanity is so adaptable, my Mother would say. Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.

There is more than one kind of freedom,” said Aunt Lydia. “Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it. -Margaret Atwood

“We must treat these girls respectfully, in a godly fashion, despite the moral stain from their lives before.” – Andrew Pryce

“You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter.” — June (Season 1, Episode 4)

“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”

“Well officially,” he says. “But everyone’s human, after all.” I wait for him to elaborate on this, but he doesn’t, so I say, “What does that mean?”

Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

“Better never means better for everyone. It always means worse for some.” — Fred (Season 1, Episode 5)

“In reduced circumstances the desire to live attaches itself to strange object” – Offred

“The Commander’s Wife directs, pointing with her stick. Many of the Wives have such gardens, it’s something for them to order and maintain and care for.

“I once had a garden. I can remember the smell of the turned earth, the plump shapes of bulbs held in the hands, fullness, the dry rustle of seeds through the fingers.”

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

“It means you can’t cheat Nature,” he says. “Nature demands variety, for men. It stands to reason, it’s part of the procreational strategy. It’s Nature’s plan.” I don’t say anything, so he goes on.

I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.

“It was true, I took too much for granted; I trusted fate, back then” – Offred

“Every love story is a tragedy if you wait long enough.” — Fred (Season 1, Episode 5)

“We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?”

“Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”

Handmaid’s Tale Quotes TV Show

This was hard to put together as I love so many quotes from the show. Hopefully some of these will provide some inspiration for you today!

“So now that we don’t have different clothes,” I say, “you merely have different women.” This is irony , but he doesn’t acknowledge it.

Maybe the life I think I’m living is a paranoid delusion…Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.

“A rose is a rose, except here. Here it has to mean something. It’s beautiful.” Offred

“Cows don’t get married” — Janine (Season 2, Episode 5)

“You can’t help what you feel, but you can help how you behave.”

“We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”

“It solves a lot of problems,” he says, without a twitch.

Don’t let the bastards grind you down.

“The most painful thing is not the betrayal of trust, June. Do you know what’s most painful? The most painful thing in this entire ugly incident is the ingratitude.” – Aunt , Lydia

“So far all you’ve offered me is coconuts and treason.” — Serena (Season 2, Episode 9)

“We learned to lip-read, our heads flat on the beds, turned sideways, watching each other’s mouths. In this way we exchanged names from bed to bed: -“Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June.”

With that man you wanted it to work, to work out. Working out was also something you did to keep your body in shape, for the man.

Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

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“How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. ” – Offred

“Love is patient, love is kind.” — Eden (Season 2, Episode 12)

“There is more than one kind of freedom,” said Aunt Lydia. “Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.”

“When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”

Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawal, which you could counteract by exercise.

Illegitimis non carborundum. Lat., Don’t let the bastards grind you down.

Handmaid’s Tale Quotes Book

We are here to offer a huge collection of inspiring and famous quotes you can find on our website, which are belong to the famous novel.

“Never mistake a woman’s meekness for weakness.” – Mrs. Castillo

“She cannot read his word!” — June

“Live in the present, make the most of it, it’s all you’ve got.”

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”

“The world can be quite an ugly place. But we cannot wish that ugliness away. We cannot hide from that ugliness.” – Aunt , Lydia

“Everybody’s talking about happily ever after, but there’s just after.” — Moira

“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. Pain marks you, but too deep to see. Out of sight, out of mind.”

“Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.”

Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.

If you don’t like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves.

Handmaid's Tale Quotes Book — Handmaid’s Tale Quotes Book

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

“There is more than one kind of freedom … Freedom to and freedom from.” – Aunt

“It’s lack of love we die from.” — June

“Better never means better for everyone… It always means worse, for some.”

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“The sitting room is subdued, symmetrical; it’s one of the shapes money takes when it freezes. Money has trickled through this room for years and years, as if through an underground cavern, crusting and hardening like stalactites into these forms.”

The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were. It hasn’t happened this morning, either.

“There was an Offred before me. She helped me find my way out. She’s dead. She’s alive. She is me.” – Offred

“He lives on the beach.” — June

Handmaid’s Tale Quotes About Power

These quotes are here to make you feel more inspired! Read these power quotes and do share with your friends.

“You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.”

“Perhaps he saw the look on my face and mistook it for something else. Really what I wanted was the cigarette.”

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain.

Don’t let the bastards grind you down. I repeat this to myself but it conveys nothing. You might as well say, Don’t let there be air; or Don’t be. I suppose you could say that.

“When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”

“Nothing safer than dead.”

You would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.

“if it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending” – Offred

Handmaid's Tale Quotes About Power — Handmaid’s Tale Quotes About Power

By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you, believe you’re there, I believe you into being. Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are. So I will go on. So I will myself to go on.

” I don’t need oranges. I need to scream. I need to grab the nearest machine gun.” – Offred

“Our father, who art in heaven … seriously? What the actual f–k?” — June

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”

“But the frown isn’t personal: it’s the red dress she disapproves of, and what it stands for. She thinks I may be catching, like a disease or any form of bad luck.”

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We’ve given them more than we’ve taken away.

We are a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.

“Sterile. That’s a forbidden word. There is no such thing as a sterile man anymore. There’s only women who are fruitful and women who are barren.” – Offred

“It’s June. You know my f–king name.” — June

“The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you’ve been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil.”

“I listen to my heart, wave upon wave, salty and red, continuing on and on, marking time.”

Think of the trouble they had before. Don’t you remember the singles’ bars.

Handmaid’s Tale Quotes About Freedom

Here are some Handmaid’s Tale Quotes About Freedom to give you think more freely and positively.

That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before.

” I stretch out my arms to him, but he slips away. Like a ghost at daybreak. And I am left here.” – Offred

“I shouldn’t have expected you to understand. You have no idea what it is like to have a child of your own flesh and blood. And you never will.” — June

“I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.”

“Don’t let them suffer too much. If they have to die, let it be fast. You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.”

Don’t you remember the terrible gap between the ones who could get a man easily and the ones who couldn’t?

How furious she must be, now that she’s been taken at her word.

“You were supposed to be one of the strong ones.” — Serena

“Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.”

“Nobody’s heart is perfect.”

Knowing was a temptation. What you don’t know won’t tempt you, Aunt Lydia use to say.

I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable. I repeat my former name; remind myself of what I once could do, how others saw me. I want to steal something.

“There’s always a black market, there’s always something that can be exchanged.” – Offred

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“At least it wasn’t you.” — June

“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.”

“The tension between her lack of control and her attempt to suppress it is horrible. It’s like a fart in church.”

But she (Aunt Lydia) knew too the spiritual value of bodily rigidity, of muscle strain: a little pain cleans out the mind, she’d say.

Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

” It’s hard making it in a society that only cares about profit and pleasure. No wonder God has turned His back on us. No wonder there are no children. He doesn’t want them to grow up in this screwed-up world.” – Andrew Pryce

Handmaid’s Tale Quotes About Control

Read these amazing Handmaid’s Tale Quotes About Control. Never be uncontrolled if you will read these quotes.

“Now, I’m awake to the world.” — June

“He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, off key, 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.”

“I wish I was ignorant, so I didn’t know how ignorant I am.”

It’s amazing what denial can do.

Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?

“There was an Offred before me. She helped me find my way out. She’s dead. She’s alive. She is me.” — June

“As for my husband, she said, he’s just that. My husband. I want that to be perfectly clear. Till death do us part. It’s final.”

“When power is scarce, a little of it is tempting.”

Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless.

“There’s always someone, even when there is no one.” – Offred

“Please, God, I don’t want pain. I don’t want to be a doll, hung on the wall. I want to keep on living. I’ll do anything. Resign my body freely to the uses of others. I’ll sacrifice. I’ll repent. I’ll abdicate. I’ll renounce.” – Offred

“It’s their own fault. They should’ve never given us uniforms if they didn’t want us to be an army.” — June

“It’s not the husbands you have to watch out for, said Aunt Lydia, it’s the Wives. You should always try to imagine what they must be feeling. Of course they will resent you. It is only natural. Try to feel for them.”

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“It isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.”

I’m not giving anything away: selling only.

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

“There’s always something to occupy the inquiring mind.”

“Pull the strings.” — June

“But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.”

See Quotes from The Handmaid’s Tale

And in this section you will get some more awesome quotes from the novel. Each and every quotes are blessed.

“Live in the present, make the most of it, it’s all you’ve got.”

I am not your justification for existence, I said to her once. I want her back, I want everything back, the way it was. But there is no point to it, this wanting.

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.

“Muffins mean yes.” — Beth

“I am not your justification for existence.”

“What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface.

You are a transitional generation, said Aunt Lydia. It is the hardest for you. We know the sacrifices you are being expected to make. It is hard when men revile you. For the ones who come after you, it will be easier. They will accept their duties with willing hearts.

And sometimes it happened, for a time.

What you really want; I’ll empty myself, truly, become a chalice. I’ll give up Nick, I’ll forget about the others, I’ll stop complaining. I’ll accept my lot. I’ll sacrifice. I’ll repent. I’ll abdicate. I’ll renounce.”

Though at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.

Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions.

That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain.

‘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.’

Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are use to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.

A man is just a woman’s strategy for making other women.

“Agreed to it right away, really she didn’t care, anything with two legs and a good you-know-what was fine with her. They aren’t squeamish, they don’t have the same feelings we do.”

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Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.”

“My name isn’t Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it’s forbidden. I tell myself it doesn’t matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter.”

‘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.

As long as we do this, butter our skin to keep it soft, we can believe that we will some day get out,

that we will be touched again, in love or desire. We have ceremonies of our own, private ones.

“It makes me feel more in control, as if there is a choice, a decision that could be made one way or the other.”

Final Words

`The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood. The story describes a future world – formerly the United States – where women’s rights have been stripped away and they are subjugated into classes.

The Handmaid’s Tale Quotes is a collection of the best quotes from Margaret Atwood’s classic novel, The Handmaids Tale.

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