Quotes About Survival

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?

Every day when I wake I tell myself that it will be my last. If you are not trying to hold on to time, you are not so afraid of losing it... And then, if you make it to bedtime, you feel the joy of cheating death out of one more day.

And it's all my fault, Gale. Because of what I did in the arena. If I had just killed myself with those berries, none of this would've happened. Peeta could have come home and lived, and everyone else would have been safe, too." "Safe to do what?" he says in a gentler tone. "Starve? Work like slaves? Send their kids to the reaping? You haven't hurt people – you've given them an opportunity. They just have to be brave enough to take it.

I'm hard to catch. If they can't catch me they cant kill me. So don't count me out.

Okay, listen to me, you're stronger than they are. You are. They just want a good show, that's all they want. You know how to hunt. Show them how good you are.

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.

Then I get it, what it means. At least, for me. District 12 only has three existing victors to choose from. Two male. One female... I am going back into the arena.

Yes, it's your fault I'm alive.

I pull the sleeping bag up to his chin and kiss his forehead, not for the audience, but for me. Because I'm so grateful that he's here, not dead by the stream as I'd thought. So glad I don't have to face Cato alone.

I wonder how she'll make up her mind." "Oh, that I do know." I can just catch Gale's last words through the layer of fur. "Katniss will pick whoever she thinks she can't survive without.

We could do it, you know," Gale says quietly. "What?" I ask. "Leave the district. Run off. Live in the woods. You and I, we could make it," says Gale. I don't know how to respond. This idea is so preposterous.

In District 12, looking old is something of an achievement since so many people die early. You see an elderly person, you want to congratulate them on their longevity, ask the secret of survival. A plump person is envied because they aren't scraping by like the majority of us. But here is different. Wrinkles aren't desirable. A round belly isn't a sign of success.

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.

Afraid of everything. If the people who were supposed to protect you played so fast and loose with your life . . . then how did you survive? Not by trusting them, that was for sure. And if you couldn't trust them, who could you trust? All bets were off.

But better off sad than dead.

And here I am, strapped into a tree, a stone's throw from the biggest idiot in the games.

Life in District 12 isn't really so different from life in the arena. At some point, you have to stop running and turn around and face whoever wants you dead. The hard thing is finding the courage to do it.

She must have really loved him to leave her home for the Seam. I try to remember that when all I can see is the woman who sat by, blank and unreachable, while her children turned to skin and bones. I try to forgive her for my father's sake. But to be honest, I'm not the forgiving type.

So it's you and a syringe against the Capitol.

Taking the kids from our districts, forcing them to kill one another while we watch – this is the Capitol's way of reminding us how totally we are at their mercy.

because I have learned the hard way how deadly these beauties can be.

And then, if you make it to bedtime, you feel the joy of cheating death out of one more day," she said. "Do you see?

Something inside me twists as I remember another voice. Rue. In the arena. When I gave her the leg of groosling. "Oh, I've never had a whole leg to myself before." The disbelief of the chronically hungry.

They hadn't counted on the highly controlled jabberjay having the brains to adapt to the wild, to pass on its genetic code, to thrive in a new form. They hadn't anticipated its will to live.