“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. 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.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and 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.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”
― The Handmaid's Tale
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and 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.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”
― The Handmaid's Tale
Misc Book Club
— 125 members
— last activity Apr 16, 2014 07:45AM
Welcome to the book club for 2014! Members please feel free to add up to three books to the To-Read shelf. Books added to the read shelf will not hav ...more
Ask S.E. Hinton - Monday, June 17th!
— 1020 members
— last activity Mar 09, 2017 04:45PM
Join us on Monday, June 17th for a special discussion with author S.E. Hinton! S.E. Hinton will be discussing her books Tex, Rumble Fish, Som ...more
Our Shared Shelf
— 222865 members
— last activity 9 hours, 36 min ago
OUR SHARED SHELF IS CURRENTLY DORMANT AND NOT MANAGED BY EMMA AND HER TEAM. Dear Readers, As part of my work with UN Women, I have started reading ...more
Julaine’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Julaine’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Julaine
Lists liked by Julaine

























