Iconic quotes from "The Hunger Games" and interviews with Suzanne Collins.
By Tamara Sanon — Written on May 23, 2020
In middle school, I read through the American author Suzanne Collins’ best selling trilogy, The Hunger Games within a matter of weeks. Like many avid readers of the best selling book series, I could not put the books down. I desperately wanted to know if the protagonist Katniss Everdeen would survive the games and whether or not she would end up with Peeta or Gale.
I won’t spoil how the novels end but given that the last installment Mockingjay has been out since 2010. I’d hope by now you already read it or at least seen the film adaptations. Having read all the books and seen all the movies, I have gotten many of my questions about the characters answered. If you haven’t, reading through some of the Suzanne Collins quotes below might get you started.
As I read the story I felt empowered because Katniss was a woman completely capable of saving herself and being the face of a revolution. I felt like the novels paid homage to girl power while displaying the importance of being aware of the less fortunate. Katniss, Peeta, and Gale lived in the 12th district of Panem so they struggled with poverty. While the citizens in Panem lived in wasteful excess. There was an undeniably noticeable social and economical hierarchy in Panem.
Having read all the books and seen all the movies, I have gotten many of my questions answered. Unfortunately, Collins wasn’t able to answer all of my questions in the first three novels of the series. It's not because she's a bad writer — It’s difficult for any author to develop every single character and answer every potential question within a limited amount of pages. This isn’t an uncommon occurrence in the literary world. Many readers find themselves unsatisfied with an author’s ending to a book or their lack of character development.
Collins published The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes on May 19, 2020 to fill in some of the blanks for her readers and further deepen the plot line. It’s no surprise that the novel is already a bestseller. It was highly anticipated.
Finally, other Hunger Games fans and I will get a chance to dive deeper into the back story of the villain of the series, President Snow. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes will likely give fans a better understanding of why the games take place and how the war affected the characters in the Capitol.
I’m excited to see how Collins tell the back story in the new novel. A well-done prequel can greatly add to a series by making the characters more relatable and fully developing why certain events took place. I can’t wait to get my hands on this new novel and to begin reading it.
Before Collins was a best selling author who had box office topping films, she was just a student getting a “master’s degree in dramatic writing from New York University”. After graduating Collins became a tv writer for children’s shows. That’s when Collins’ boss saw the potential she had to be a great writer. That's why he encouraged her to start writing books.
In 2003 Collins did just that. She published her first novel of The Underland Chronicles series called Gregor the Overlander. Unlike in The Hunger Games, this novel’s protagonist is a boy in New York who uncovers a new world. The novel became a bestseller and Collins added another four novels to the series.
On top of all those literary successes. Collins added screenplay writer to her resume. Collins is a great example of how your career can take you places you never imagined. Check out these Suzanne Collins quotes from interviews with the author, as well as some of the most famous lines from her books.
1. “I wish I could freeze this moment, right here, right now and live in it forever.”
2. “If you had hope, maybe you could find a way to make things change. Because if you thought about it, there were so many reasons to try.”
3. “I want to do something, right here, right now, to shame them, to make them accountable, to show the Capitol that whatever they do or force us to do there is a part of every tribute they can't own.”
4. “Make sure they remember you.”
5. “Some walks you have to take alone.”
6. “I see now that the circumstances of ones birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are.”
7. “Kind people have a way of working their way inside me and rooting there.”
8. “If desperate times call for desperate measures, then I'm free to act as desperately as I wish.”
9. “You know, I think I show a lot of promise."
10. “I am not pretty. I am not beautiful. I am as radiant as the sun.”
11. “He became my confidante, someone with whom I could share thoughts I could never voice...In exchange, he trusted me with his.”
12. "Aim higher in case you fall short.”
13. “But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.”
14. “I noticed just about every girl, but none of them made a lasting impression but you.”
15. “Hope, it is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective, a lot of hope is dangerous.”
16. “No matter what I do, I'm hurting someone."
17. “Sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them.”
18. “At the moment, the choice would be simple. I can survive just fine without either of them.”
19. “A spark could be enough to set them ablaze.”
20.“There's plenty of blame to go around.”
21. “But if you want to find peace, you must first be able to hope it is possible.”
22. “If you are not trying to hold on to time, you are not so afraid of losing it.”
23.“Courage only counts when you can count.”
24. “The sun persists in rising, so I make myself stand”
25. "Highly unlikely but not impossible.”
26. "She genuinely likes people. All people, not just a select few she's spent years making up her mind about."
27. “Let them go, I tell myself. Say good-bye and forget them. I do my best, thinking of them one by one, releasing them like birds from the protective cages inside me, locking the doors against their return.”
28. “They more than do their work, they take pride in it.”
29. "We fight, we dare, we end our hunger for justice."
30. “No one will forget me. Not my look, not my name."
31. “Run like the river.”
32. “But some secrets are too delicious not to share.”
33. "I love her more than anything.”
34. “The more likable he is, the more deadly he is.”
35. “Never having been in love, this is going to be a real trick. I think of my parents. The way my father never failed to bring her gifts from the woods. The way my mother's face would light up at the sound of his boots at the door. The way she almost stopped living when he died.”
36. "As long as you can find yourself, you’ll never starve."
37. “While you live, the revolution lives”
38. "The only thing I feel is a desire to be somewhere else. So I let the train rock me into oblivion.”
39. "And then, if you make it to bedtime, you feel the joy of cheating death out of one more day.”
40. “I'm not allowed to bet, but if I could, my money would be on you.”
41. “Thinking like your prey. . . that's where you find their vulnerabilities.”
42. “Crying is not an option.”
43. “You don't destroy what you want to acquire in the future.”
44. “Better not to give in to it. It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.”
45. “But the words are easy and soothing, promising tomorrow will be more hopeful than this awful piece o time we call today.”
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Tamara Sanon is a writer who covers astrology, spirituality, love and relationship topics.