The Handmaid's Tale

Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is usual. Even this is as usual, now.
We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in the ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.
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.

Hume was a strict empiricist

(while in his study) Live forever

Behind me I distinctly hear the word magistrate. Do I imagine it or are my neighbors inching away from me?
The Colonel steps forward. Stooping over each prisoner in turn he rules a handful of dust into his naked back and writes a word with charcoal. I read the words upside down: ENEMY . . . ENEMY . . . ENEMY . . . ENEMY? He steps back and fold his hands. At a distance of no more than twenty paces he and I contemplate each other.
Then the beating begins. The soldiers use the stout green cane staves, bringing them down with the heavy slapping sounds of washing-paddles, raising red welts on the prisoners' backs and buttocks. With slow care the prisoners extend their legs until they lie flat on their bellies, all except the one who had been moaning and who now gasps with each blow.
Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee