"We learned to lip-read, our heads flat on the beds, turned sideways, watching each other's mouths. In this way we exchanged names from bed to bed:
Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June."

(Chapter 1)

"At neck level, there's another sheet, suspended from the ceiling. It intersects me so the doctor will never see my face."

(Chapter 11)

"I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born."

(Chapter 12)

"My name isn't Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it's forbidden. I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter."

(Chapter 14)

"Falling in love. [...] It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that."

(Chapter 35)

"I have been obliterated for her. I am only a shadow now, far back behind the glib shiny surface of this photograph. A shadow of a shadow, as dead mothers become. You can see it in her eyes: I am not there."

(Chapter 35)

"I tell him my real name and feel that therefore I am known. I act like a dunce. I should know better. I make of him an idol, a cardboard cutout."

(Chapter 41)

" "I am Ofglen," the woman says. Word perfect. And of course she is, the new one, and Ofglen, wherever she is, is no longer Ofglen. I never did know her real name."

(Chapter 44)

"The Commander's Wife directs, pointing with her stick. Many of the Wives have such gardens, it's something for them to order and maintain and care for.
I once had a garden. I can remember the smell of the turned earth, the plump shapes of bulbs held in the hands, fullness, the dry rustle of seeds through the fingers.'

(Chapter 3)

"One of them is vastly pregnant [...] She's a magic presence to us, an object of envy and desire, we covet her. She's a flag on a hilltop, showing us what can still be done: we too can be saved."

(Chapter 5)

"I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolour picture of blue irises, and why the window opens only partly and why the glass in it is shatter-proof. It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge."

(Chapter 2)