“Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, riskin...”

“Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.”

“Husband and wife have no time left to spend together. Marriage took away our one reason for getting married.”

“We came to realize how little married couples see of each other once they crawl in the bourgeois box.”

“Maybe marriages are best in middle age. When all the nonsense falls away and you realize you have to love one another because you're going to die anyway.”

“The virtues about marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man's world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much. Damned clever, I thoug...”

“One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.”

“Everybody has a home team: Its the people you call when you get a flat tire or when something terrible happens. Its the people who, near or far, know everything thats wrong with you and love you an...”

“The more you condemn yourself for thinking or feeling a certain way, the more you feel stuck within your own body and mind.. What if you went the other way and embraced it so totally that it was as...”

“How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.”

“Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.”

“What a sad story, I thought for so long. Not that I now think it was happy. But I think it is true, and thus the question of whether it is sad or happy has no meaning whatever.”

“...I gave you painted air - tears I couldn't weep - truths I couldn't speak - all the words that caught in my throat...”

“He wept, and it felt as if the tears were cleansing him, as if his body needed to empty itself.”

“Prim, let go," I say harshly, because this is upsetting me and I don't want to cry. When they televise the replay of the reapings tonight, everyone will make note of my tears, and I'll be marked as...”