Paper 2 quotes

Handmaids Tale: Quote about the scrabble scene. When the commander wants to play scrabble with her.

“Now it’s desirable. Now he’s compromised himself. It’s as if he’s offered me drugs”

Handmaids Tale: Scrabble scene. Shows that everything in Gilead is dangerous. She needs to be extra careful

“I win the first game, I let him win the second: I still haven’t discovered what the terms are, what I will ask for, in exchange.”

Handmaids Tale: Said when Offred + Ofglen are by the wall. Said by Aunt Lydia. Shows how Gilead transforms repulsion into blankness. Horror into normalcy. Torture + oppression become accepted because it is what they are used to.

“This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.”

Handmaids tale: Storytelling - shows how storytelling is an act of rebellion. Offred speaks out when Gilead seeks to silence her. Offred denies Gilead control over her inner life.

“If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be am ending, to the story, and real life will come after it.”

Handmaids Tale: Shows that she is no longer important. That her body is a tool.

“I used to think of my body as an instrument… or an implement for the accomplishment of my will… Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object.”

TTTC: Said by Mary Anne Bell. Shows how the war becomes a part of you. The war has possessed her and she can’t come back from the transformation. - the sweetheart of the song tra bong

“I want to eat this place. Vietnam.”

TTTC: said about Mary Anne Bell. Shows her transformation - the sweetheart of the song tra bong

“She was wearing her culottes, her pink sweater, and a necklace of human tongues.”

TTTC: Said about Norman Bowker. Shows that he is stuck in a loop and can’t connect to anyone around him. Links to metaphor of the clock and time - Bowman driving in circles - speaking of courage

“He couldn’t talk, and the town wouldn’t listen.”

TTTC: Said by Lee Sanders. links to storytelling - about morals in war stories. The stories are about the emotions, not the facts, not the morals. - how to tell a true war story

“‘Hear that quiet man?’ he said. ‘That quiet - just listen. There’s your moral’.”

TTTC: about morals in war stories. The stories are about the emotions, not the facts, not the morals. morals are hard to find because the stories are so complicated, built up from so many things - how to tell a true war story

“In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth.”

TTTC: Represents the isolating nature of war. No one understands because war is so complicated. They think its horror but soldiers are brave. In reality it is so much more. People don’t understand how truths can be contradictory. - How to tell a true war story

“War is nasty; was is fun. War is thrilling; was is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead. The truths are contradictory.”

TTTC: about how war is never true. The emotions and feelings are more important than the facts. The emotions is what people don’t understand so they try to convey it through stories. -

“In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a war story nothing is ever absolutely true.”

TTTC: about storytelling. used as a survival method. Immerse themselves in other situations so they can forget about the war and its horrors.

“What stories can do, I guess, is make things present”.

TTTC: About the contrast and juxtaposition between bravery and cowardice. what is bravery and what is cowardice. - On the rainy river

“I was a coward. I went to war.”

TTTC: about cowardice and bravery (foreshadows for on a rainy river). why men go to war. O’Brien alludes tot he idea that men do unspeakable things partly because of impulse but mostly because of peer pressure. The greatest tragedy of the Vietnam War is not its violence but instead its ability to inspire compliance. - the things they carried

“They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing.”