Chapter 1
"The guards weren't allowed insisde the building except when called, and we weren't allowed out, except for our walks, twice daily two by two around the football field which was encolsed now by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.
Chapter 2
"Like other things now, thought must be rationed. There's a lot that tdoesn't bear thinking about. Thinking can hurt your chances and I intend to last."
"But a chair, sunlight, flowers; these are not to be dismissed. I am alive, i live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight. Where I am not a prison but a privelege , as Aunt Lydia said, who was in love with either/or."
" I know what you mean, we'd say. Or, a quaint expression you somtimes hear, still from older people: I hear where your're coming from, as if the voices itself were a traveller, arriving from a distant place. Which it would be, which it is.
How I changed and despise such talk. Now I long for it. At least it was talk. An exchange, of sorts."
"Or I would help Rita to make the bread, sinking my hands into that soft resistant warmth which is souch like flesh. I hunger to touch something, other than cloth or wood. I hunger to commit the act of touch"
Chapter 3
"Sometimes I think these scarves aren't sent to the anGELS AT ALL, BUT THE UNRAVELLED AND THRUBED BACK INTO BALLS of yarn, to be knitted again in their turn. Maybe it's just something to keep the Wives busy, to give them a sense of purpose. But I envy the Commander's wivefe her knitting. It's good to have small goals that can be easily atttained."
Chapter 5
"There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchi, it was freedom to. Now you are being fiven freedom from. Don't underrate it"
Chapter 6
Though this is hardly needed. No woman in her right mind, these days, would seek to prevent a birth, should she be so lucky as to conceive.
- This is so much the opposite of what we live for.
Chapter 8
Chapter 9 (ood)
So. I explored this room, not hastily, then, like a hotel room, wasting it. I didn'tg want to do it all at once, i wanted to make it last. I divided the room into sections, in my head; I allowed myself one section a day. This one section I would examine with the greatest minuteness; the uneveness of the paster under the walllpaper.
Chapter 11
Yes, I say. It's true, and I don'task why, because I know. Give me children, or else I die. There;s more than one meaning to it.
Chapter 16 (good)
My arms are raised; she holds my hands, each of mine in each of hers. This is supposed to sgnify that we are on flesh, one bing. What it really means is taht she in control, of the process and thus of the product. If any. The ings of her left hand cut into my fingers. It may or may not be revenge.
At least he's an improvement on the previous one, who smelled like a church cloackroom in the rain; like your mouth when the dentists starts pickinga at your teeth; like a nostril. THe COmmmander instead, smells of mothballs, or is this odour some punivitive form of aftershave? wHY DOES HE HAVE TO WEAR THAT STUPID UNIFORM? but would I like his white, tufted raw body any better?
Chapter 17
We are containers, it's only the inside of our bodies that are important.
This was a decree of the wives, this absence of hand lotion. They don't want us to look attractive. For them, things are as bad as it is.
Chapter 18
But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from. There's nobody here i can love, all the people i could love area dead or elsw=ewhere.
I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up outside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor.
Chapter 23
Let's stop there. I intend to get out of here. It can't last forever. Others have thought such things, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn't last forever. ALthough for them it may have lasted all the forever they had.
- There is a very powerful thought, both in an optimistic way but also in a depressive way.
Chapter 25
So there it was, out in the open, his wife didn't understand him. That's what I was for then, the same old thing. Too banal to be true.
- How important is understanding each in love.
For him, I must remember i am only a whim
Chapter 27
"I thought you were a true believer," Ofglen says. "I thought you were," i say. "You were a lways so stinking pious." "So were you," i reply. I want to laugh, shout, hug her.
- This a very beautiful part of the book
Chapter 28
It was after the catastrophe, when they shote the President and machine=gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency. They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time.
- "this is so incredibly real"
"No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn[t do abadly by one another, we did as well as most."
"He doesn't mind this, I thought. He doesn't mind it at all. Maybe he even likes it. We are not each other's any more. Instead, I am his."
Chapter 29
He leans back, fingertips toeghter, a gesture familiar to me now. We have built up a repertoire of such gestures, such familiarities, between us. He's looking at me, not unbenevolently, but with curiosity, as if i am a puzzle to be solved.
"I would like ..." i say. "I would like to know." It sounds indecisive, stupid even, I say it wihout thinking. "Know what" he says. "Whatever there is to know" i say; but that's too flippant. "What's going on"
Chapter 30
Oh god, it's no joke, oh god, oh god. How can I keep on living.
Chapter 31
"It's a risk" I say, "More than that." It's my life on the line, but that's where it will be sooner or later, one way or another, whether I do or don't. We both know this."
Chapter 32
"Sometimes after a few drinks he becomes silly, and cheats at Scrabble. He encourages me to do it too, and we take extra letter and make words with them that don't exist, words like smurt and crup griggling over them. Sometimes he turn on this short-wave crup, giggling over them. Sometimes he turns on this short-wave radio, displaying before me a minute or two of Radio Free America, to show me he can. The he turns it off again. Damn Cubans, he says. All that filth about universal daycare.
- the fact that he is 50 makes him completely disguisting.
Chapter 33
As they did no doubt with Janine. "That's terrible," I say. It's like Janine though to take it upn herself, to decide the baby's flaws were due to her alone. But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, thatis. No plot"
Chapter 35
"God is love, they said once, but we reversed that, and love, like Heaven, was always around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the paritcular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word made flesh"
Chapter 37
"Women know that instinctively. Why did they buy so many different cclothes, in the old days? To trick the men into thinking they were several different women. A new one each day."
Chapter 39
Fake it, I scream at myself inside my head. You must remember how. Let's get thsi over with or you' be here all night. bestir yourself. Move your flesh around, btreahe audibly. OIt's the least you can do.
Chapter 44 (good)
"She hanged herself," she says. "Aftre the Salvaging. She saw the van coming for her. It was better."
Chapter 45 (good)
I feel for the first time, their true power.
- This is so 1984
end
something that drives me crazy in this book is the fact that for us, history is just that a history, we are so emotionally detatched from everything that happened before us, can you believe the massacre of nanjing actually happened? That's truly insane, how can you live your life so easily and just give a fake smile that we are humanistic having said that so many people suffered throught history.