Suzanne Collins Quotes

Starvation is incredibly frightening when it finally sets in with a vengeance. And when it does,you are surprised. You hadn't meant this. You say: Wait, not this. And then it sucks you under and you drown.

I will never forget the hunger I used to feel.

A guy I interviewed for Hard Times says, "What do I remember about the Great Depression? That I was hungry, that's all." Elemental things.

Tragedies come in the hungry hours.

And who is any of us, that without starvation he can go through the kingdoms of starvation?

There is no humiliation more abusive than hunger.

I have seen what the days of tribulation can do to people. I have seen hunger stalk the streets of Europe. I have witnessed the appalling, emaciated shadows of human figures. I have seen women and children scavenge army garbage dumps for scraps of food. Those scenes and nameless faces cannot be erased from my memory.

There is no birth of consciousness without pain.

I remember people who'd had a lot of hardship during the war. They'd thought we'd won.

There's some things I can't write about, just terrible personal tragedies.

It was a hard time. It was something I would love to erase from my memory.

A more shocking scene cannot be imagined, than that witnessed by the party of men who went to the relief of the unfortunate emigrants in the California Mountains. The bones of those who had died and been devoured by the miserable ones that still survived were lying around their tents and cabins. Bodies of men, women and children, with half the flesh torn from them, lay on every side. A woman sat by the body of her husband, who had just died, eating out his tongue; the heart she had already taken out, broiled, and eat! The daughter was seen eating the flesh of the father - the mother that of her children - children that of father and mother. The emaciated, wild, and ghastly appearance of the survivors, added to the horror of the scene. Language cannot describe the awful change that a few weeks of dire suffering had wrought in the minds of these wretched and pitiable beings. Those who but one month before would have shuddered and sickened at the thought of eating human flesh, or of killing their companions and relatives to preserve their own lives, now looked upon the opportunity by these acts afforded them of escaping the most dreadful of deaths …

All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today.

No agitation for political reforms could be carried on by a plague-stricken and starving people. Food was what they needed and most urgently demanded. The political argument died away, drowned in cries and petitions for relief, lost in weepings and wailings for the victims who were perishing in hundreds by the roadsides, in the fields, and in their bare and empty houses.

Trauma and pain and suffering can be the very thing that dislodges a person from themselves both in awful ways and larger ways that force one to reckon with one's own life.

Losing a game is not a tragedy after experiencing border raids and having to eat beetles because you are out of rations.

It's never easy to watch. It's never great to see your friend or teammate put himself through hell.

A moment comes in war when the last line must be crossed. The line that separates what you hold dear from what total war demands. If he couldn't cross that line, the battle was over, and he was lost. His heart, the war. Her face, the battlefield. With a cry only he could hear, the hunter turned. And ran.

There are children in Africa, starving to death, and you don't hear them whinging.

Hunger. It's like an animal trapped inside you, Thomas thought.

People don't speak of hunger when they know what it is to be hungry.

If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart.

Hunger is never delicate.

I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.