8
" Era così che si viveva allora? Vivevamo di abitudini. Come tutti, la maggior parte del tempo. Qualsiasi cosa accade rientra sempre nelle abitudini. Anche questo, ora, è un vivere di abitudini. Vivevamo, come al solito, ignorando. Ignorare non è come non sapere, ti ci devi mettere di buona volontà.
Nulla muta istantaneamente: in una vasca da bagno che si riscaldi gradualmente moriresti bollito senza nemmeno accorgertene. C'erano notizie sui giornali, certi giornali, cadaveri dentro rogge o nei boschi, percossi a morte o mutilati, manomesso, così si diceva, ma si trattava di altre donne, e gli uomini che commettevano simili cose erano altri uomini. Non erano gli uomini che conoscevamo. Le storie dei giornali erano come sogni per noi, brutti sogni sognati da altri. Che cose orribili, dicevamo, e lo erano, ma erano orribili senza essere credibili. Erano troppo melodrammatico, avevano una dimensione che non era la dimensione della nostra vita. Noi eravamo la gente di cui non si parlava sui giornali.
Vivevamo nei vuoti spazi bianchi ai margini dei fogli e questo ci dava più libertà.
Vivevamo negli interstizi tra le storie altrui. "
― Margaret Atwood , The Handmaid's Tale
10
" Each twinge, each murmur of slight pain, ripples of sloughed-off matter, swellings and diminishings of tissue, the droolings of the flesh, these are signs, these are the things I need to know about. Each month I watch for blood, fearfully, for when it comes it means failure. I have failed once again to fulfill the expectations of others, which have become my own. "
― , The Handmaid's Tale
14
" I take it from her, turn it around so I can see I right-side-up. Is this her, is this what she's like? My treasure.
So tall and changed. Smiling a little now, so soon, and in her white dress as if for an olden-days First Communion.
Time has not stood still. It has washed over me, washed me away, as if I'm nothing more than a woman of sand, left by a careless child too near the water. I have been obliterated for her. I am only a shadow now, far back behind the glib shiny surface of this photograph. A shadow of a shadow, as dead mothers become. You can see it in her eyes. I am not there.
But she exists, in her white dress. She grows and lives. Isn't that a good thing? A blessing?
Still, I can't bear it, to have been erased like that. Better she'd brought me nothing. "
― , The Handmaid's Tale
17
" 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. "
― , The Handmaid's Tale
20
" You were a wanted child, God knows, she would say at other moments, lingering over the photo albums in which she had me framed; these albums were thick with babies, but my replicas thinned out as I grew older, as if the population of my duplicates had been hit by some plague. She would say this a little regretfully, as though I hadn't turned out entirely as she'd expected. No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most.
I wish she were here, so I could tell her I finally know this. "
― , The Handmaid's Tale
