The word shatter
“I lie in bed, still trembling. You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter. I want to be with someone.” —Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Sex versus love
“Nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from.” —Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Disembodied
“Can I be blamed for wanting a real body to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied.” —Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
I loved you
“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.” —Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Freedom
“Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake …. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan in The Testaments
Falling
“I don’t like remembering that feeling. It was like having a sinkhole open up and swallow you—not only you but your house, your room, your past, everything you’d ever known about yourself, even the way you looked—it was falling and smothering and darkness, all at once.” —Margaret Atwood, The Testaments
