Suzanne Collins Quotes

My advice would be not to write until after 35. You need some experience, and for life to knock you about a bit. Growing up is so hard you probably won't have much emotion to spare anyway.

I have led an unusual life. I have buried a father killed at age 50 and two brothers killed in the prime of their lives. I raised my children as a single mother when my husband was arrested and held for eight years without a conviction - a hostage to my political career.

I think everybody has their pain. For me, the time that I really had to grow up was when I was 15 and I had my best friend die of leukemia. Watching somebody so strong go through that is definitely something that will give you a little bit of depth. There have been a lot of things that have happened in my life that has forced me to grow up.

I had to grow up fast.

I grew up really fast.

My entire tenth grade year, my dad was in a coma. That changes a person. It changes a kid. It makes you ridiculously independent.

I had to grow up very quickly.

I had to grow up a little fast.

Oftentimes, experiencing tragedy very young can strangely give you a kind of equilibrium.

I grew up very quickly because of the difficulties and responsibilities that I have always had.

It is better to have some unhappiness while one is still young, for if a person does not experience some bitterness, his disposition will not settle down.

I don't know who will overcome losses, some losses aren't meant to be overcome, but all losses make for good stories and good character development and all the jazz that makes a show compelling and watchable.

My mother used to talk about passages and, once in a while, about ordeals. We all have them; we are all shaped by them. She thought the key was to find the healing in the hurt.

One thing I did have under my belt was, my mother lost her mother when she was 11. She mourned her mother her whole life and made my grandmother seem present even though I never met her. I couldn't imagine how my mom could go on but she did, she took care of us, she worked two jobs and had four children. She was such a good example of how to conduct oneself in a time of grief. When I lost my husband, I tried to model myself as much as I could on her.

I was homeless. I lived in a car for a couple of years. That was the worst. But nothing was worse than when I was 40 and my mom passed away. My mother was the best person I ever knew. Those were the two lowest points.

We are never ripe till we have been made so by suffering.

People who hadn't suffered a loss yet struck me as not quite grown up.

I felt that that experience, because of the responsible nature that I found I acted all during that traumatic time, that I felt that I was a man.

Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength.

My father died when I was 10; my sister got polio a couple of years later and was paralyzed. So there I was - my sister in a wheel chair, my father gone, and my mother a quiet little mouse. You see, it was the '30s in the South, so my mother was not prepared to cope. So I was scared to death. And being that scared, everything afterward became a struggle not to go down the drain. Struggling became a way of life for me.

She’s really gone, then. The little girl with the back of her shirt sticking out like a duck tail, the one who needed help reaching the dishes, and who begged to see the frosted cakes in the bakery window. Time and tragedy have forced her to grow too quickly, at least for my taste, into a young woman who stitches bleeding wounds and knows our mother can hear only so much.

We are far betting dealing with the big losses-death, divorce, debt, and debilitating illness-than with the daily onslaught of little losses.

Disappointment came to me, and booted me, and bruised and hurt me, but that's how people grow up.

I had a very rough childhood and not a happy one and by age 15 I was an old person in many ways. I knew that I had to take care of myself, I um and I always did.

When I was 19 years old, both of my parents died in the same year; my mom of cancer and my dad in a car accident. Through the next two or three years and a series of bad decisions - all my own, I might add - I ended up literally homeless, before that was even a word. I even slept occasionally under a pier on the Gulf Coast.