The Hunger Games Trilogy

by Suzanne Collins

I learned to hold my tongue and to turn my features into an indifferent mask

boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong.

A kind Peeta Mellark is far more dangerous to me than an unkind one.

“Katniss, the girl who was on fire.”

You don’t forget the face of the person who was your last hope.

How I never question Gale’s motives while I do nothing but doubt the latter’s.

Believe it or not, there was once music in my house, too.

For whatever reason, this is a first. A district gift to a tribute who’s not your own.

The sun persists in rising, so I make myself stand.

can feel the steadiness that Peeta brings to everything.

My nightmares are usually about losing you,” he says. “I’m okay once I realize you’re here.”

“You could live a hundred lifetimes and not deserve him, you know,”

I drift off, I try to imagine that world, somewhere in the future, with no Games, no Capitol. A place like the meadow in the song I sang to Rue as she died. Where Peeta’s child could be safe.

it’s you and a syringe against the Capitol? See,

No one in their right mind would let me make the plans. Because I obviously can’t tell a friend from an enemy.

Gale is not one to keep secrets from me.

Some walks you have to take alone.

It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.”

The sixteen-year-old boy who won the second Quarter Quell must have had people he loved — family, friends, a sweetheart maybe — that he fought to get back to. Where are they now? How is it that until Peeta and I were thrust upon him, there was no one at all in his life? What did Snow do to them?

“No. My mother and younger brother. My girl. They were all dead two weeks after I was crowned victor. Because of that stunt I pulled with the force field,”

guess there isn’t a rule book for what might be unacceptable to do to another human being.”

kindness, the steadiness, the warmth that had an unexpected heat behind it.

music is provided by a choir of children accompanied by the lone fiddler who made it out of 12 with his instrument. So

There’s no going back. So we might as well get on with things.”

the rejuvenating effect that a good meal can bring on. The way it can make people kinder, funnier, more optimistic, and remind them it’s not a mistake to go on living.

But if Coin sent Peeta here, she’s decided something else as well. That I’m of more use to her dead than alive.

“You’re still trying to protect me. Real or not real,” he whispers. “Real,” I answer.

“No one knows what to do with you, girlie.”

Having no work, grief buries me.

The truth is, it benefits no one to live in a world where these things happen.

“But collective thinking is usually short-lived.

That what I need to survive is not Gale’s fire, kindled with rage and hatred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. And only Peeta can give me that.

How can I tell them about that world without frightening them to death?

My children, who don’t know they play on a graveyard.

That’s when I make a list in my head of every act of goodness I’ve seen someone do. It’s like a game. Repetitive. Even a little tedious after more than twenty years. But there are much worse games to play.