A favorite strategy was the paragraph-terminating: Right? Followed immediately by Wrong. This linear invitation to a mugging was considered a strategy of wit.

People have been modeling their lives after films for years, but the medium is somehow unsuited to moral lessons, cautionary tales or polemics of any kind.

Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.

Bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.

Lyda was an exuberant, even a dramatic gardener.... She was always holding up a lettuce or a bunch of radishes with an air of resolute courage, as though she had shot them herself.

Fear . . . is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.

There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

My dislike has no consequences. It accrues only in my mind—like preserves on a shelf or guns zeroing in, and never firing.

No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.

My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.

The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.

Is there any success without an effort?

The dead cannot cry out for justice. It is a duty of the living to do so for them.

The faking of feelings is a sin against the imagination.

When officers' actions violate their duty, justice should be served in accordance with our legal system.

Good music is good music.

Pop songs now, they're about the aftermath of love.

I'm making little changes in my life to take care of myself, like putting in a mile or two on my treadmill every day.

Of power does Man possess no particle: Of knowledge-just so much as show that still It ends in ignorance on every side.

I wonder how she'll make up her mind." "Oh, that I do know." I can just catch Gale's last words through the layer of fur. "Katniss will pick whoever she thinks she can't survive without.

Moral nihilism comes with a price we can now see.