The Hunger Games: Illustrated Edition

by Suzanne Collins

My mother says healers are born, not made.

This is the nature of the tracker jacker venom, so carefully created to target the place where fear lives in your brain.

Destroying things is much easier than making them.”

hollow day

That’s a day where no matter what you put in your belly, it’s never enough.

this. Past harm, but seeming utterly defenseless.

Rue’s death has forced me to confront my own fury against the cruelty,

But there’s been enough gore today. Perhaps we’ll even get to sleep.

Something happened when I was holding Rue’s hand, watching the life drain out of her. Now I am determined to avenge her, to make her loss unforgettable, and I can only do that by winning and thereby making myself unforgettable.

My mother’s hand strokes my cheek and I don’t push it away as I would in wakefulness, never wanting her to know how much I crave that gentle touch.

Besides, it’s the first gift that’s always the hardest to pay back.

This is the first kiss where I actually feel stirring inside my chest. Warm and curious. This is the first kiss that makes me want another.

no one else’s arms have made me feel this safe.

I pull the sleeping bag up to his chin and kiss his forehead, not for the audience, but for me.

I wonder now if Cato might not be entirely sane.

I’ve spent so much time making sure I don’t underestimate my opponents that I’ve forgotten it’s just as dangerous to overestimate them as well.

Why don’t they leave? Why do they stay to watch? And now I know. It’s because you have no choice.

There’s usually a lag of a few days between the end of the competition and the presentation of the victor so that they can put the starving, wounded, mess of a person back together again.

But the Hunger Games are their weapon and you are not supposed to be able to defeat it.