J L’s Reviews > The Handmaid's Tale > Status Update

// 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.