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If you haven’t heard of The Handmaid’s Tale by now, you’ve probably been living under a rock or maybe in your own personal Gilead.
Margaret Atwood wrote the eponymous novel in 1985, and it still hits way too close to home. The drama follows a dystopian future where the government gets replaced by religious zealots running the show. Welcome to Gilead: where women’s rights are ancient history, everyone’s watching everyone else, and you can get killed just for looking the wrong way.
Amidst all this is Offred— that’s not her real name, but that’s all we get, because in Gilead, women don’t even get to keep their own names. She’s called “Of-Fred” (Property of Fred). She used to have a life—a husband (Luke), a kid, a job, and everything.
But now she is a Handmaid, which is a fancy way of saying she’s forced to have babies for the bigwigs because infertility has become a national crisis. The whole thing’s wrapped up in so-called religious rituals called “the Ceremony,” where nobody is consenting and everyone’s miserable.
Offred spends her days tiptoeing through routines, shopping with her assigned buddy Ofglen, dodging the Eyes (a.k.a. the secret police), and trying not to end up on the Wall, which is where they hang the “bad” people, as a public service announcement. And yet, even in this hellscape, she finds these tiny cracks where she can push back.
There’s Nick, the chauffeur, who’s way more than just a ride. There’s the underground Mayday resistance. And then there’s the Commander, Fred Waterford, who ropes her into late-night Scrabble games and lets her read, which is forbidden for women.
Other women in Gilead aren’t exactly living the dream, either. You’ve got the Aunts, the regime’s squad who train the Handmaids; the Wives, who are usually bitter and sometimes complicit; the Marthas, stuck doing the housework; and Handmaids like Janine and Ofglen, each with their own tragic backstory.
The damage here isn’t just physical—it’s emotional and psychological. Kids get ripped away, hope gets stomped on, and the fear is constant.
Atwood messes around with memory and time, bouncing between Offred’s old life and her new reality. The writing is sharp, haunting, and always alive. Words themselves are a battlefield—some are banned, some are whispered in secret, and sometimes just telling your story becomes the most radical act you can pull off.
The epilogue, “Historical Notes on The Handmaid’s Tale,” places Offred’s whole tale as a pieced-together artifact. It invites readers to question the reliability of official narratives and the erasure of women’s voices from history.
People have been talking about The Handmaid’s Tale forever—and for good reason. It keeps showing up in protests, TV shows, memes, everywhere. The Handmaid’s Tale isn’t just a story about losing your rights; it’s a warning, a battle cry, and a reminder that things can go downhill way faster than you think.
Anyway, here are ten quotes from The Handmaid’s Tale that’ll stick with you long after you finish the TV show. Each one is like a little window into just how twisted Gilead really is.
10 quotes from The Handmaid’s Tale that reveal Gilead’s true horror
1) “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.”
Offred stumbles on this Latin scribble—“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum”—carved into her closet. Some Handmaid before her left it behind. The whole “don’t let the bastards grind you down” becomes a secret mantra of resistance.
For Offred, it’s more than just graffiti. It’s this little pulse of hope in a place that’s all about crushing people’s spirits. This means she is not the first to hate this system in The Handmaid’s Tale, and she won’t be the last.
The phrase turns into her private battle cry, a secret handshake with every woman forced through that hellish house. Plus, the fact that it’s hidden is proof enough that the regime’s terrified of people thinking for themselves. Language is dangerous. Words are survival tools. Even scratched into the floor, they can mess with the people in charge.
“Blessed be the fruit.”
It is the classic “hello” for Handmaids and pretty much any woman trapped in Gilead.
The bigwigs in The Handmaid’s Tale made up this phrase as a daily chant—hello and propaganda all rolled into one. Fertility’s their national obsession, and they slap some Bible on everything to make it stick.
“Blessed be the fruit” might sound sweet, but it’s just a pious mask for the ugly truth: women are nothing more than baby-making machines here. Every time a Handmaid spits this out, it’s like the regime is poking them to not forget their only purpose.
Repeat it enough, and nobody remembers who they were before the red robes.
“Under His Eye.”
It’s the classic Gilead goodbye—everybody says it, from the top dogs to the folks just trying to stay out of trouble.
People in The Handmaid’s Tale say this phrase at the end of pretty much every conversation. It’s a creepy little reminder that Big Brother is always lurking, watching your every move.
“Under His Eye” is not a warm-and-fuzzy sign-off. It’s the regime’s way of saying that they are watching you all the time. So you’re never really alone, and everyone’s tiptoeing around, paranoid that their neighbor or even their own shadow might sell them out.
“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”
Offred’s sitting there, thinking about how her “freedom” in Gilead is a joke. Sure, they give her a tiny bit of wiggle room—just enough to pretend she’s got choices, but not enough to actually matter. It’s classic mind games reverberated throughout The Handmaid’s Tale.
The bigwigs at the top want everyone to feel like they’re in control, but they’re just yanking the strings and watching people dance. Offred totally gets what’s up, though. She sees right through the smoke and mirrors, and it just messes with her head even more.
That’s the clinching point—knowing the game is rigged but still having to play along.
“Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.”
Here, Commander Waterford tries to sell Offred on the idea that Gilead is just the bee’s knees. He goes on about how their shiny new rules have somehow made everything better. It’s almost laughable—sure, things look “improved” if you’re at the top of the food chain.
This little confession of his rips the mask off the whole operation. He admits that all these so-called “gains” are built on the backs of women and anyone else who doesn’t fit into their tidy little boxes.
It’s rare to see a bigwig in Gilead let their guard down, even for a second, but when they do, it just screams hypocrisy. The whole system is rigged in The Handmaid’s Tale, and he knows it—he just doesn’t care as long as he’s winning.
“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
Offred has got a point—people just sort of drift along, totally oblivious, until the world tilts sideways and suddenly they’re like, “Wait, what just happened?” She’s looking back at her old life, and there’s this raw ache in her voice, like she’s kicking herself for not seeing the warning signs.
It’s scary how people can just fade into the background like they never even existed. History kind of sweeps you under the rug if you’re not careful.
And freedom is not always this big, flashy thing. Sometimes it’s just being able to blend in, to slip by unnoticed. But once those little pockets of freedom vanish, it’s game over for everyone. Offred’s waving a red flag here, saying that we need to wake up before it’s too late.
“When we think of the past, it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.”
Offred is just sitting there, lost in her own head, clinging to old memories. It’s funny—she knows the past wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but now it feels precious because what else does she have left?
That’s people for you, always putting a golden filter on what came before, even if it was a mess. Her memories aren’t just nostalgia—they’re bittersweet reminders of everything that’s been ripped away.
It’s almost cruel, the way your mind cherry-picks the good stuff when reality bites. Trauma does that to you. It messes with your head, makes you crave the comfort of “before,” even if “before” wasn’t so great in the first place.
“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance; you have to work at it.”
Offred’s talking to herself here, just sort of mulling over how you pretty much have to force yourself not to see what’s going on if you want to make it through Gilead with your sanity intact.
It’s not like denial just happens to you—it’s a choice. People aren’t just passively blind; they’re putting on those blinders on purpose.
That’s the messed-up genius of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale: the whole system counts on people not wanting to look too close. If everyone started facing reality, the whole thing would probably crack wide open.
But survival sometimes means pretending really, really hard.
“Freedom, like everything else, is relative.”
Aunt Lydia is talking to the handmaids here. She has got a knack for twisting words until you don’t know which way is up. She stands there, all smug, telling the Handmaids that their cages are actually cozy little nests.
It’s almost impressive how she can spin flat-out oppression into “protection.” It is a lesson in weaponized language—she’s not just talking, she’s brainwashing. Every time she opens her mouth, you can practically hear the regime’s gears grinding, turning freedom into a four-letter word.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, Gilead’s got this nasty habit of rewriting reality, and Aunt Lydia is the poster child for it.
“They can do what they like with me. I am abject. I feel, for the first time, their true power.”
Offred’s just sitting there. She has been poked and prodded, humiliated on repeat, and now she’s just... empty. She has acknowledged her utter powerlessness. It’s like she’s finally clocked just how deep this pit goes.
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The moment where she actually names her own “abjection”, it hits hard. She’s not just giving up; she’s staring right at what these creeps in charge have done to her, and it’s brutal.
It is a warning siren for every woman trapped in Gilead’s nightmare. Now there’s no sugarcoating—this is what happens when people in power decide you’re less than human.
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