The past is a great darkness, and filled with echos. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we...

If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too. Maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man,...

I guess you get all my money, I said. And I'm not even dead. I was trying for a joke, but it came out sounding macabre.Hush, he said. He was still kneeling on the floor. You know I'll always take care...

You young people don't appreciate things, she'd say. You don't know what we had to go through, just to get you where you are. Look at him, slicing up the carrots. Don't you know how many women's...

I have them, these attacks of the past, like faintness, a wave sweeping over my head.

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...

Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon...

Women can't add, he once said, jokingly. When I asked him what he meant, he said, For them, one and one and one and one don't make four. What do they make? I said, expecting five or three. Just one...

I sit at the little table, eating creamed corn with a fork. I have a fork and a spoon, but never a knife. When there's meat they cut it up for me ahead of time, as if I'm lacking manual skills or...

The tension between her lack of control and her attempt to suppress it is horrible. It's like a fart in church.

I look up at the ceiling, tracing the foliage of the wreath. Today it makes me think of a hat, the large-brimmed hats women used to wear at some period during the old days: hats like enormous halos,...

I don't even close my eyes. Out there or inside my head, it's an equal darkness. Or light.

I try to remember if the past was exactly like this. I'm not sure, now. I know it contained these things, but somehow the mix is different. A movie about the past is not the same as the past

Nobody's heart is perfect.

...there was little that was truly original or indigenous to Gilead. Its genius was synthesis.

If it is only a story, it seems less frightening.

Flowers, for instance, because where would we be without them?

Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I'm a cloud, congealed around a center object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping....

Two-thirty comes during Testifying. It's Janine, telling about how she was gang-raped at fourteen and had an abortion.But whose fault was it? Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger. Her fault,...

If i thought this would never happen again I would die.But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

The bell that measures time is ringing

There were still newspapers, then. We used to read them in bed. It's French, he said. From . Help Me.

But something had shifted, some balance. I felt shrunken, so that when he put his arms around me, gathering me up, I was as small as a doll. I felt love going forward without me.

The willow is full plumage and is no help, with its insinuating whispers.Rendevous, it says. Terraces;the sibilants run up my spine, a shiver as if in fever. The summer dress rustles against the flesh...

Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and can be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.

I didn't much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.

I remember a television program I once saw {...} I must have been seven or eight, too young to understand it. It was the sort of thing my mother liked to watch: historical, educational. She tried to...

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.

I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed

Nature demands variety, for men. It stands to reason, it's a part of the procreational strategy. It's Nature's Plan. Women know that instinctively. Why did they buy so many different clothes, in the...