Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire

"but it's not safe and I can feel him slipping away, so I just get out one more sentence. "Stay with me." As the tendrils of sleep syrup pull me down, I hear him whisper a word back but I don't catch it."

"Prim... Rue... 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 had the right to treat them as they have been treated? Yes. This is the thing to remember when fear threatens to swallow me up."

"I'm not prepared for Rue's family. Her parents, whose faces are still fresh with sorrow. Her fiver younger siblings, who resemble her so closely. The slight builds, the luminous brown eyes. They form a flock of small dark birds."

"Since I’ve been home I’ve been trying hard to mend my relationship with my mother. Asking her to do things for me instead of brushing aside any offer of help, as I did for years out of anger. Letting her handle all the money I won. Returning her hugs instead of tolerating them. My time in the arena made me realize how I needed to stop punishing her for something she couldn’t help, specifically the crushing depression she fell into after my father’s death. Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them."

"I'm ordered to a week of bed rest and I don't object because I feel so lousy. Not just my heel and my tailbone. My whole body aches with exhaustion. So I let my mother doctor me and feed me breakfast in bed and tuck another quilt around me. Then I just lie there, staring out my window at the winter sky, pondering how on earth this will all turn out."

"The beauty of this idea is that my decision to keep Peeta alive at the expense of my own life is itself an act of defiance. A refusal to play the Hunger Games by the Capitol's rules. My private agenda dovetails completely with my public one. And if I really could save Peeta... in terms of a revolution, this would be ideal. Because I will be more valuable dead. They can turn me into some kind of martyr for the cause and paint my face on banners, and it will do more to rally people than anything I could do if I was living. But Peeta would be more valuable alive, and tragic, because he will be able to turn his pain into words that will transform people."

"Either you came in here a swimmer or you'd better be a really fast learner"

"Because sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them."

"I thought he wanted it, anyway," I say. "Not like this," Haymitch says. "He wanted it to be real."

"As coal pressured into pearls by our weighty existence. Beauty that arose out of pain."

"Having an eye for beauty isn't the same thing as a weakness."

"hey. I just wanted to make sure you got home," I say. "Katniss, I live three houses away from you," he says."

"Shame isn't a strong enough word for what I feel. "You could live a hundred lifetimes and not deserve him, you know," Haymitch says."

"Look, if you wanted to be babied you should have asked Peeta."

"The idea of being strong for someone else having never entered their heads, I find myself in the position of having to console them. Since I'm the person going in to be slaughtered, this is somewhat annoying."

"I really can't think about kissing when I've got a rebellion to incite."

"I'm going to wake Peeta," I say."No, wait," says Finnick. "Let's do it together. Put our faces right in front of his."Well, there's so little opportunity for fun left in my life, I agree. We position ourselves on either side of Peeta, lean over until our faces are inches frim his nose, and give him a shake. "Peeta. Peeta, wake up," I say in a soft, singsong voice. His eyelids flutter open and then he jumps like we've stabbed him. "Aa!"Finnick and I fall back in the sand, laughing our heads off. Every time we try to stop, we look at Peeta's attempt to maintain a disdainful expression and it sets us off again."

"You could do a lot worse."

"Aim higher in case you fall short."

"Because, sometimes, things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them."