J L > Recent Status Updates

//人類的信仰是建立在便利、習慣和自身利益上，而不是建立在理性上 。//

// When power is scarce, a little of it is tempting.

// the best and most cost-effective way to control women for reproductive and other purposes was through women themselves. For this there were many historical precedents; in fact, no empire imposed by force or otherwise has ever been without this feature: control of the indigenous by members of their own group.

// to institute an effective totalitarian system or indeed any system at all you must offer some benefits and freedoms, at least to a privileged few, in return for those you remove.

// Scapegoats have been notoriously useful throughout history, and it must have been most gratifying for these Handmaids, so rigidly controlled at other times, to be able to tear a man apart with their bare hands every once in a while.

// All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always only approximate.

ba thos | 'bä,THäs | noun
(especially in a work of literature) an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous.

pizzazz | pizaz | noun
an attractive combination of vitality and glamour.

// Bodily functions at least remain democratic. Everybody shits, as Moira would say.

// We ascend in the glass half-egg of the elevator, past the vine-draped balconies. I am to understand also that I am on display.

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.

// You can't help what you feel, Moira said once, but you can help how you behave.
Which is all very well.
Context is all. //

This is what it is as of now :(

// After the books were transferred they were supposed 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.

This is what it is as of now :(

// I worked transferring books to computer discs, to cut down on storage space and replacement costs, they said. Discers, we called ourselves. We called the library a discotheque, which was a joke of ours.

Awww such cuteness, yes it does very appealing to women when men do that:

// I would like -' he says. "This will sound silly? And he does look embarrassed, sheepish was the word, the way men used to look once.

He's old enough to remember how to look that way, and to remember also how appealing women once found it. The young ones don't know those tricks. They've never had to use them. //

// To want is to have a weakness.

It's like a small crack in a wall, before now impenetrable. //

// forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.

… Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. //

// 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. //

// nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from. //

squander | 'skwonda | verb
waste (something, especially money or time) in a reckless and foolish manner.

// 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. //

Stream-of-consciousness writing:

// We wait, the clock in the hall ticks, Serena lights another cigarette, *I get into the car.*

*It's a Saturday morning, if's a September*, we still have a car. Other people have had to sell theirs. My name isn't Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it's forbidden.

…

*It’s a Saturday morning in September, I’m wearing my shining name. //

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

// We lived in the gaps between the stories. //

// The difference between lie and lay. Lay is always passive. Even men used to say, I'd like to get laid. Though sometimes they said, I'd like to lay her. All this is pure speculation. //

I like the use of direct and plain text, sometimes as metaphors, for the way things are described in the book, which makes it cold hard, and with the onion-peeling approach to layer and accelerate the heaviness of the story. This leads to an anticipation that somehow, the harder the oppression is, the more vigorous the uprising would be.

// They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone.

These women could be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose. We seemed to be able to choose, then.

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

Touché.

// 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. //

// The young ones are often the most dangerous, the most fanatical, the jumpiest with their guns. They haven't yet learned about existence through time. You have to go slowly with them. //

// Maybe it's just something to keep the Wives busy, to give them a sense of purpose. But I envy the Commander's Wife her knitting.

It's good to have small goals that can be easily attained. //

// I hunger to commit the act of touch. //