“I requested off this damn night shift four times now. Barbara needs me. Barbara and little James. So I hope it's boy, so what?”

“I look like Barbara Bush in drag." Aunt Jettie”

“So I’d been called the Barbara Walters of weird shit.There’s weird shit and then there’s weird shit.”

“I got shagged in Santa Barbara, and all I got was this fantastic orgasm.”

“Barbara is on what is called the woman's trip to the exclusion of almost everything else. When she and Tom and Max and Sharon need money, Barbara will take a part-time job, modeling or teaching kindergarten, but she dislikes earning more than ten or twenty dollars a week. Most of the time she keeps house and bakes. "Doing something that shows your love that way," she says, "is just about the most beautiful thing I know." Whenever I hear about the woman's trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin'-says-lovin'-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara.”

“The only indication of the passage of time lies in the heavens, the subtle shift of the moon. So Peeta begins pointing it out to me, insisting I acknowledge its progress and sometimes, for just a moment I feel a flicker of hope before the agony of the night engulfs me again.”