Suzanne Collins - The Hunger Games (2008)

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By the end of the session, I am no one at all. Haymitch started drinking somewhere around witty, and a nasty edge has crept into his voice. "I give up, sweetheart. Just answer the questions and try not to let the audience see how openly you despise them.

Suzanne Collins
When I break into the clearing, she's on the ground, hopelessly entangled in a net. She just has the time to reach her hand through the mesh and say my name before the spear enters her body.

Suzanne Collins
They play in the Meadow. The dancing girl with the dark hair and blue eyes. The boy with blond curls and gray eyes, struggling to keep up with her on his chubby toddler legs. It took five, ten, fifteen years for me to agree. But Peeta wanted them so badly. When I first felt her stirring inside of me, I was consumed with a terror that felt as old as life itself. Only the joy of holding her in my arms could tame it.

Suzanne Collins
To this day, I can never shake the connection between this boy, Peeta Mellark, and the bread that gave me hope, and the dandelion that reminded me that I was not doomed.

Suzanne Collins
I've asked you fifty questions and still have no sense of your life, your family, what you care about. They want to know about you, Katniss." "But I don't want them to! They're already taking my future! They can't have the things that mattered to time in the past!" I say.

Suzanne Collins
You don't forget the face of the person who was your last hope.

Suzanne Collins
So at least half the victors have instructed their mentors to request you as an ally. I know it can't be your sunny personality. They saw her shoot, says Peeta with a smile. Actually, I saw her shoot, for real, for the first time. I'm about to put in a formal request myself. You're that good? Haymitch asks me.

Suzanne Collins
My lips are just forming his name when his fingers lock around my throat.

Suzanne Collins
Buttercup, miserable even with Prim's constant attention, huddles in the cube and exhales cat breath in my face.

Suzanne Collins
No more fear of hunger. A new kind of freedom. But what then... what? What would my life be like on a daily basis? Most of it has been consumed with the acquisition of food. Take that away and I'm not really sure who I am, what my identity is. The idea scares me some.

Suzanne Collins
The bird, the pin, the song, the berries, the watch, the cracker, the dress that burst into flames. I am the mockingjay. The one that survived despite the Capitol's plans. The symbol of the rebellion.

Suzanne Collins
Yes, they have to have a victor. Without a victor, the whole thing would blow up in the Gamemakers' faces. They'd have failed the Capitol. Might possibly even be executed, slowly and painfully, while the cameras broadcast it to every screen in the country.

Suzanne Collins
If I get home, I'll be so stinking rich, I'll be able to pay someone to do my hearing.

Suzanne Collins
Enobaria smiles at Johanna. 'Don't look so smug,' says Johanna. 'We'll kill you anyway.

Suzanne Collins
She's really gone, then. The little girl with the back of her shirt sticking out like a duck tail,

Suzanne Collins
Aren't they the very reason I have to try to fight? Because what has been done to them is so wrong, so beyond justification, so evil that there is no choice? Because no one has the right to treat them as they have been treated?

Suzanne Collins
One slip. One slip in thousands. The odds had been entirely in her favor. But it hadn't mattered.

Suzanne Collins
Even though I don't ask, Plutarch gives me cheerful updates on the phone like "Good news, Katniss! I think we've almost got him convinced you're not a mutt!" Or "Today he was allowed to feed himself pudding!

Suzanne Collins
Because something is significantly wrong with a creature that sacrifices its children's lives to settle its differences. You can spin it any way you like... But in the end, who does it benefit? No one. The truth is, it benefits no one to live in a world where these things happen

Suzanne Collins
If you die and i live there's no life for me back in District 12. You're my whole life. I would never be happy again.

Suzanne Collins
But once I saw Fulvia Cardew crumple up a sheet of paper with just a couple of words written on it and you would've thought she'd murdered someone from the looks she got.

Suzanne Collins
As we trudge back through the woods, we reach a boulder, and both Gale and I turn our heads in the same direction, like a pair of dogs catching a scent on the wind. Cressida notices and asks what lies that way. We admit, without acknowledging each other, it's our old hunting rendez-vous place. She wants to see it, even after we tell her it's nothing really. Nothing but a place where I was happy, I think.

Suzanne Collins
I go back to my room and lie under the covers, trying not to think of Gale and thinking of nothing else.

Suzanne Collins
Then he smiles as if he'd be happy to lie there and gaze at me forever.

Suzanne Collins
I wish Peeta were here to hold me, until I remember I'm not supposed to wish that anymore. I have chosen Gale and the rebellion, and a future with Peeta is the Capitol's design, not mine.

Suzanne Collins
Peeta, you were supposed to wake me after a couple of hours," I say. "For what? Nothing's going on here," he says. "Besides, I like watching you sleep. You don't scowl. Improves your looks a lot." This, of course, brings on a scowl that makes him grin.

Suzanne Collins
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........

Suzanne Collins
I want to do something, right here, right now, to shame them, to make them accountable, to show the Capitol that whatever they do or force us to do there is a part of every tribute they can't own. That Rue was more than a piece in their Games. And so am I.

Suzanne Collins
I can't fight the sun. I can only watch helplessly as it drags me into a day that I've been dreading for months. Katniss Everdeen

Suzanne Collins
I can't help comparing what I have with Gale to what I'm pretending to have with Peeta. How I never question Gale's motives while I do nothing but doubt the latter's. It's not a fair comparison really. Gale and I were thrown together by a mutual need to survive. Peeta and I know the other's survival means our own death. How do you sidestep that?

Suzanne Collins