The Testaments

“You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.”

“As they say, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

“Once a story you’ve regarded as true has turned false, you begin suspecting all stories.”

“You’d be surprised how quickly the mind goes soggy in the absence of other people. One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person.”

“The truth can cause a lot of trouble for those who are not supposed to know it.”

“And how easily a hand becomes a fist.”

“No one wants to die,” said Becka. “But some people don’t want to live in any of the ways that are allowed.”

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.”

“Being able to read and write did not provide answers to all questions. It led to other questions, and then to others.”

“But it can put a lot of pressure on a person to be told they need to be strong.”

“The inventor of the mirror did few of us any favours: we must have been happier before we knew what we looked like.”

“Nobody is any authority on the fucks other people give,”

“Where there is an emptiness, the mind will obligingly fill it up. Fear is always at hand to supply any vacancies, as is curiosity. I have had ample experience with both.”

“We’re stretched thin, all of us; we vibrate; we quiver, we’re always on the alert. Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet.”

“You pride yourself on being a realist, I told myself, so face the facts. There’s been a coup, here in the United States, just as in times past in so many other countries. Any forced change of leadership is always followed by a move to crush the opposition. The opposition is led by the educated, so the educated are the first to be eliminated.”

“All that was necessary was a law degree and a uterus: a lethal combination.”

“Still, I wanted to believe; indeed I longed to; and, in the end, how much of belief comes from longing?”

“It’s better that way, and I am a great proponent of better. In the absence of best.”

“Totalitarianisms may crumble from within, as they fail to keep the promises that brought them to power; or they may be attacked from without; or both. There are no sure-fire formulas, since very little in history is inevitable”

“I was the age at which parents suddenly transform from people who know everything into people who know nothing. —”

“How can I have behaved so badly, so cruelly, so stupidly? you will ask. You yourself would never have done such things! But you yourself will never have had to.”

“You take the first step, and to save yourself from the consequences, you take the next one. In times like ours, there are only two directions: up or plummet.”

“I was buying time. One is always buying something.”

“Life is not about hair,” I said then, only half jocularly. Which is true, but it is also true that hair is about life. It is the flame of the body’s candle, and as it dwindles the body shrinks and melts away.”

“underlings given sudden power frequently become the worst abusers of it.”

“The muscles of my face were beginning to hurt. Under some conditions, smiling is a workout.”

“How tedious is a tyranny in the throes of enactment. It’s always the same plot.”

“You don't believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.”

“Giving up was the new normal, and I have to say it was catching.”

“I, too, was once like you: fatally hooked on life.”