The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total.

More from The Handmaid's Tale

• All I can hope for is a reconstruction: the way love feels is always approximate.
• There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, for something that was always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then.
• Beginnings are sudden, but also insidious. They creep up on you sideways, they keep to the shadows, they lurk unrecognized. Then, later, they spring.
• Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.
• Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the blind shadow cast by its absence.
• If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary.