"A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women."
"It's impossible to say a thing exatcly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavours in the air or on the tongue, half-colours, too many. But if you happen to be a man, sometime in the future, and you've made it this far, please remember: you must forgive, a man, as a woman. It's difficult to resist, believe me. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really wbout who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing."
"What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangment of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, crisscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be."
"A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze."
"By telling you anything at all at least I'm believing in you, I believe you're there, I believe you into being. Because I'm telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are (...) After all you've been through, you deserve whatever I have left, which is not much but includes the truth."
- The handmaid's tale, Margaret Atwood
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