"And may the odds—" He tosses a berry in a high arc toward me. I catch it in my mouth and break the delicate skin with my teeth. The sweet tartness explodes across my tongue. "—be ever in your favor!"

"Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don’t think of District 12 as a place that cares about me. But a shift has occurred since I stepped up to take Prim's place, and now it seems I have become someone precious. At first one, then another, then almost every member of the crowd touches the three middle fingers of their left hand to their lips and holds it out to me. It is an old and rarely used gesture of our district, occasionally seen at funerals. It means thanks, it means admiration, it means good-bye to someone you love."

""So you're supposed to give us some advice", I say to Haymitch. "Here's some advice. Stay Alive," says Haymitch and bursts out laughing."

"Ladies and gentlemen, let the Seventy-fourth Hunger Games begin!"

"Winning means fame and fortune. Losing means certain death. The Hunger Games have begun."

"She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother. Of course, she did. This is the day of the reaping."

"So I learned to hold my tongue and to turn my features into an indifferent mask so that no one could ever read my thoughts."

"I wonder what Gale made of the incident for a moment and then I push the whole thing out of my mind becouse for some reason Gale and Peeta do not coexist well together in my thoughts."

"The Hunger Games is a reality television program. An extreme one, but that's what it is. And while I think some of those shows can succeed on different levels, there's also the voyeuristic thrill, watching people being humiliated or brought to tears or suffering physically. And that's what I find very disturbing. There's this potential for desensitizing the audience so that when they see real tragedy playing out on the news, it doesn't have the impact it should. It all just blurs into one program. And I think it's very important not just for young people, but for adults to make sure they're making the distinction. Because the young soldier's dying in the war in Iraq, it's not going to end at the commercial break. It's not something fabricated, it's not a game. It's your life."

"I enter a nightmare from which I wake repeatedly only to find a greater terror awaiting me. All the things I dread most, all the things I dread for others manifest in such vivid detail I can’t help but believe they're real. Each time I wake, I think, At last, this is over, but it isn't. It's only the beginning of a new chapter of torture. How many ways do I watch Prim die? Relive my father's last moments? Feel my own body ripped apart? This is the nature of the tracker jacker venom, so carefully created to target the place where fear lives in your brain."

""This is your earpiece. I will give you exactly one more chance to wear it. If you remove it from your ear again, I'll have you fitted with this." He holds up some sort of metal headgear that I instantly name the head shackle. "It's an alternative audio unit that locks around your skull and under your chin until it's opened with a key. And I'll have the only key. If for some reason you're clever enough to disable it,"—Haymitch dumps the head shackle on the bed and whips out a tiny silver chip—"I'll authorize them to surgically implant this transmitter into your ear so that I may speak to you twenty-four hours a day." Haymitch in my head full-time. Horrifying. "I'll keep the earpiece in," I mutter."

"Hendrix says one of the most important things Battle Royale and The Hunger Games share is the idea of teenagers trapped in a ruined society, coerced by grownups into doing horrible things."

"Katniss," Gale says softly. I recognize that voice. It's the same one he uses to approach wounded animals before he delivers a deathblow. I instinctively raise my hand to block his words but he catches it and holds on tightly. "Don't," I whisper. But Gale is not one to keep secrets from me. "Katniss, there is no District Twelve."

"I want to tell the rebels that I am alive. That I'm right here in District Eight, where the Capitol has just bombed a hospital full of unarmed men, women, and children. There will be no survivors. [...] I want to tell people that if you think for one second the Capitol will treat us fairly if there's a cease-fire, you're deluding yourself. Because you know who they are and what they do. [...] This is what they do! And we must fight back! [...] President Snow says he's sending us a message? Well, I have one for him. You can torture us and bomb us and burn our districts to the ground, but do you see that?" We're with the camera, tracking to the planes burning on the roof of the warehouse. Tight on the Capitol seal on a wing, which melts back into the image of my face, shouting at the president. "Fire is catching! And if we burn ... you burn with us!"

"“In our world, I rank music somewhere between hair ribbons and rainbows in terms of usefulness.”"

""Come on," says Cato. He thrusts a spear into the hands of the boy from District 3, and they head off in the direction of the fire. The last thing I hear as they enter the woods is Cato saying, "When we find her, I kill her in my own way, and no one interferes." Somehow I don't think he's talking about Rue. She didn't drop a nest of tracker jackers on him."

"My Name is Katniss Everdeen. I am seventeen years old. My home is District 12. I was in The Hunger Games. I escaped. The Capitol hates me. Peeta was taken prisoner. He is thought to be dead. Most likely he is dead. It is probably best if he is dead..."

"“Katniss, she’s running this district. She can’t do it if it seems like she’s caving in to your will.” “You mean she can’t stand any dissent, even if it’s fair.”"

"“Time is the central mystery of our existence. It confines and defines us in many ways.”"

"“None of us ever knows what impact we have on the world around us.”"

"Certainty sent a sick dread snaking through his gut: he was being stalked."

"“Contrary to what many may think, immortality is not a fairy tale invented to compensate for an unhappy life.”"

"Little Archie’s story is darker, more desperate, and yet drearily familiar."

"A favourite saying in China—which she had heard on occasion from her own grandmother—was that the threads of life are easy to weave, but difficult to untangle."

"If her hunch was right, the earl’s explorations were connected in some way to ley travel: that peculiar phenomenon that had plucked her from the twenty-first century and dropped her so rudely into the seventeenth."

"It had long been an ambition to find the line of force that might lead to the Holy Land in the time of Christ."

"How very bright this empire of stars, he mused. Which poet had said that?"

"His last thought, as sleep overtook him, was that it was true what Cosimo had said: the universe was far stranger than anyone imagined, or could imagine."

"Before Egypt, long before travelling to that time and place—or any other—became even a remote possibility, Mina had paid her dues. Haltingly, painstakingly, maddeningly."

"The great hulking eminence of the stone-age mound stood out as an ominous dark shadow."

"He was a stranger in a strange land: lost in the cosmos, a man with neither compass nor guide, sitting in a tomb in Egypt surrounded by the dead, with Giles—a man his own age, but separated by class and sensibility and four hundred years—looking to him for answers."

"You really don’t want to get lost."

"“If the heat doesn’t kill you,” he mused, “the flies surely will.”"

"I’ve moved heaven and earth to find you."

"Once again he felt the now-familiar tingle on his skin, as when, just before a lightning strike, the air becomes electrically charged."

"The air crackled with the presage of lightning, and a heavy mist descended around them."

"London had vanished. In place of the lively, thrusting metropolitan conurbation was an empty rural wilderness of damp brown fields under low autumnal skies."

"People did not go jumping from one place to another with nothing in between. It simply did not happen."

"Alea iacta est. The die has been cast."

"Getting lost is the least of your worries."

"But isn’t that hazardous—messing with events?"

"You’re changing the course of history. I thought that sort of thing was strictly forbidden."

"See here, if a simple act of kindness or generosity, such as buying a loaf of bread for some poor working women, can mean that wholesale death and destruction will be avoided—why, a man would be a monster who had it in his power to alleviate all that suffering yet stood by and did nothing."

"Jump blind and you might find yourself on the rim of a raging volcano, or smack in the middle of a battlefield during a savage war, or on a swiftly tilting ice floe in a tempest-tossed sea."

"You see, this universe we inhabit is made up of billions of galaxies—literally beyond counting—and this is only one universe."

"These dimensions impinge on one another. They touch. They interpenetrate. And where one dimension touches or passes through another, it forms a line of force on the landscape."

"Early man recognised these lines of force and marked them out on the landscape with, well, any old thing, really—standing stones, ditches, mounds, tumps, sacred wells, and that sort of thing. And, later on, with churches, market crosses, crossroads, and whatnot."

"We in our present generation stand on the cusp of a new and glorious dawn when mastery of these energies lies fully within our grasp as secret yields to inquiry, which yields to experimentation, which leads to verification and duplication, which, in the final course, leads to knowledge."

"When next you turn your eyes to the vast reaches of heaven, gentlemen, you would be well advised to remember that not only is it far more magnificent than the human mind can fathom, it is far more subtle. All the universe is permeated, upheld, knit together, conjoined, encompassed, and contained by the Elemental Ether, which we recognise as an all-pervading, responsive, and intelligent field of energy, eternal and inexhaustible, which is nothing less than the ground of our very being and the wellspring of our existence—that which in ages past and present men have been pleased to call God."

"Even well-known words were often pronounced differently and could have unfamiliar meanings; connotations were not fixed, but fluid. Definitions drifted. He was constantly brought up short by the sudden realization that what he thought he had said was not at all what he meant—at least as it had been understood by his hearers. Still, he was coming to grips with the slippery speech, and his confidence was growing."