G Reads’s Reviews > The Handmaid’s Tale > Status Update

"the van waits in the driveway, its double doors stand open. the two of them, one on either side now, take me by the elbows to help me in. whether this is my end or a new beginning i have no way of knowing: i have given myself over into the hands of strangers, because it can't be helped. and so i step up, into the darkness within or else the light."

"so. more waiting. lady in waiting: that's what they used to call those stores where you could buy maternity clothes. woman in waiting sounds more like someone in a train station. waiting is also a place: it is wherever you wait. for me it's this room. i am a blank, here, between parentheses. between other people."

"i put on my clothes, summer clothes, it's still summer; it seems to have stopped at summer. july, its breathless days and sauna nights, hard to sleep. i make a point of keeping track. i should scratch marks on the wall, one for each day of the week...but what would be the use, this isn;t a jail sentence; there's no time here that can be done and finished with."

"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."

"maybe they're drugging me. maybe the life i think i'm living is a paranoid delusion. not a hope. i know where i am, and who, and what day it is. these are the tests, and i am sane. 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."

"i would like to steal something from this room. i would like to take some small thing, the scrolled ashtray, the little silver pillbox from the mantel perhaps, or a dried flower: hide it in the folds of my dress or in my zippered sleeve, keep it there until this evening is over, secrete it in my room...or in a shoe...every once in a while i would take it out and look at it. it would make me feel that i have power."

"i remember walking in art galleries, through the 19th century: the obsession they had then with harems. dozens of paintings of harems, fat women lolling on divans...studies of sedentary flesh painted by men who'd never been there...they are paintings about suspended animation; about waiting, about objects not in use. they were paintings about boredom. but maybe boredom is erotic, when women do it, for men."