Suzanne Collins: Likeness (page 2)

“One time, my mother told me that I always eat like I'll never see food again. And I said, "I won't unless I bring it home." That shut her up.”

“You're a painter. You're a baker. You like to sleep with the windows open. You never take sugar in your tea and you always double knot your shoelaces.' I fight back. Then I dive back into my tent before I do something stupid like cry.”

“Run like the river.”

“There's no point in comforting words, in telling her she'll be all right. She's no fool. Her hand reaches out and I clutch it like a lifeline. As if it's me who's dying instead of Rue.”

“As far as I can tell, they never get up before noon unless there's some sort of national emergency, like my leg hair.”

“Thinking like your prey… that's where you find their vulnerabilities.”

“They can't hurt me. I'm not like the rest of you. There's no one left I love.”

“If it's true, why do they leave us to live like this? With the hunger and the killings and the Games?" And suddenly I hate this imaginary underground city of District 13 and those who sit by, watching us die. They're no better than the Capitol.”

“I don't like self-righteous people," I say.

"What's to like?" says Haymitch, who begins sucking the dregs out of the empty bottles.”

“Something inside me shuts down and I'm too numb to feel anything. It's like watching complete strangers in another Hunger Games. But I do notice they omit the part where I covered her in flowers.

Right. Because even that smacks of rebellion.”

“She genuinely likes people. All people, not just a select few she's spent years making up her mind about.”

“I'm trying to think of a witty comeback, when Boggs says brusquely, “Well, don't expect us to be too impressed. We just saw Finnick Odair in his underwear.” I decide to go ahead and like Boggs.”

“I lean over and put my good ear to his lips, which tickle me as he whispers. "Remember, we're madly in love, so it's all right to kiss me any time you like it.”

“And right when your song ended I knew - just like your mother - I was a goner," Peeta says. "Then for the next eleven years, I tried to work up the nerve to talk to you.”

“It's ideal really. They will come up with a plan. No one will like it. Everyone will feel they have been treated unfairly, but will be happy that their neighbors feel the same. And that is the nature of compromise. Now let's go eat an awful lot.”

“I drink in his wholeness, the soudness of his body and mind. It runs through me like the morphling they give me in the hospital, dulling the pain of the last weeks.”

“It's weird, how much he's noticed me. Like the attention he's paid to my hunting. And apparently, I have not been as oblivious to him as I imagined, either. The flour. The wrestling. I have kept track of the boy with the bread.”

“He could have had his choice of any woman in the district. And he chose solitude. Not solitude – that sounds too peaceful. More like solitary confinement.”

“It's like being home again, when they bring in the hopelessly mangled person from the mine explosion, or the woman in her third day of labor, or the famished child struggling against pneumonia and my mother and Prim, they wear that same look on their faces. Now is the times to run away tho the woods, to hide in the trees until the patient is long gone and in another part of the Seam the hammers make the coffin. But I'm held here both by the hovercraft walls and the same force that holds the loved ones of the dying. How often I've seen them, ringed around our kitchen table and I thought, Why don't they leave? Why do they stay to watch?
And now I know. It's because you have no choice.”