Fiction

Kindle Users’ 10 Most Highlighted Passages of THE HANDMAID’S TALE

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Amanda Nelson

Staff Writer

Amanda Nelson is an Executive Director of Book Riot. She lives in Richmond, VA.

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The Handmaid’s Tale is everywhere, what with our society creeping ever closer to the book becoming reality under a President who is hostile to women, and with the newly-released Hulu show (so close to home, y’all). Library wait lists for the book have surged, and the book has found itself on the top of Amazon’s bestseller list. In light of this new popularity, we were wondering what parts specifically are resonating with readers these days. So we asked Amazon, and they told us! Here we go, the 10 most highlighted passages of the book via Kindle users (yes, they can track that):

  1. “There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.”
  2. “Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.”
  3. “We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.”
  • “It was after the catastrophe, when they shot 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.”
  • “How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.”
  • “Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.”
  • “But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.”
  • “But people will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.”
  • “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.”
  • “You can’t help what you feel, Moira once said, but you can help how you behave.”