"Like other things now, thought must be rationed. There's a lot that doesn't bear thinking about. Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last." (8)

"Ofglen stops beside me and I know that she too cannot take her eyes off these women. We are fascinated, but also repelled. They seem undressed. It has taken so little time to change our minds, about things like this." (28)

"We've learned to see the world in gasps." (30)

"It's the bags over the heads that are the worst, worse than the faces themselves would be. It makes the men like dolls on which the faces have not yet been painted; like scarecrows, which in the way is what they are, since they are meant to scare. Or, as if their heads are sacks, stuffed with some undifferentiated material, like flour or dough. It's the obvious heaviness of the heads, their vacancy, the way gravity pulls them down and there's no life anymore to hold them up. The heads are zeros." (32)

"The night is mine, my own time, to do with as I will, as long as I am quiet. As long as I don't move. As long I lie still." (37)

“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.

It isn't a story I'm telling.

It's also a story I'm telling, in my head, as I go along.

Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case forbidden. But if it's a story, even in my head, I must be telling it to someone. You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else.

Even when there is no one.

A story is like a letter. Dear You, I’ll say. Just you, without a name. Attaching a name attaches you to the world of fact, which is riskier, more hazardous: who knows what the chances are out there, of survival, yours? I will say you, you, like an old love song. You can mean more than one.

You can mean thousands.

I’m not in any immediate danger, I’ll say to you.

I’ll pretend you can hear me.

But it’s no good I know you can’t.” (39-40)

"We lived as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it." (56)

"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." (66)

"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 keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I'll come back to dig up, one day. I think of this name as buried. This name has an aura around it, like an amulet, some charm that's survived from an unimaginably distant past." (84)

"We are containers, it's only the insides of our bodies are important. The outside can become hard and wrinkled, for all they care, like the shell of a nut." (96)

"It's lack of love we die from. There's nobody here I can love, all the people I could love are dead or elsewhere." (103)

"I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light." (105)

"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." (109)

"We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices." (136)

"'Us?' I say. There is an us then, there's a we. I knew it.

'You didn't think I was the only one,' she says.

I didn't think that. It occurs to me she may be a spy, a plant, set to trap me; such is the soil in which we grow. But I can't believe it; hope. is rising in me, like a sap in a tree. Blood in a wound. We have made an opening." (169)

After the books were transferred I they were suppose to go to the shredder, but sometimes I took them home with me. I liked the feel of them, and the look. Luke said I had the mind of an antiquarian." (173)

"It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on Islamic fanatics, at the time.

Keep calm, they said on television. Everything is under control. I was stunned. Everyone was, I know that. It was hard to believe. The entire government, gone like that. How did they get in, how did it happen?

That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on." (174)

"Hell we can make for ourselves." (195)

"But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use that is. No plot." (215)

"Freedom, like everything else, is relative." (231)

"Still, it's amazing how easily it comes back to mind, this corny and falsely gay sexual banter. I can see now what it's for, what it was always for: to keep the core of yourself out of reach, enclosed, protected." (262)

"I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was." (263)

“I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, than at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish it were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one’s life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow.

I’m sorry there is so much pain in this story. I’m sorry it’s in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it.” (267)

"I know this can't be right but I think it anyway. Everything they taught at the Red Center, everything I've resisted, comes flooding in. I don't want pain. I don't want to be a dancer, my feet in the air, my head a faceless oblong of white cloth. I don't want to be a doll hung up on the Wall, I don't want to be a wingless angel. I want to keep on living, in any form. I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They can do what they like with me. I am abject.

I feel, for the first time, their true power." (286)

"Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end." (292)