Jenny

“I'm coming back into focus when Caesar asks him if he has a girlfriend back home. Peeta hesitates, then gives an unconvincing shake of his head.

Handsome lad like you. There must be some special girl. Come on, what’s her name?" says Caesar.

Peeta sighs. "Well, there is this one girl. I’ve had a crush on her ever since I can remember. But I’m pretty sure she didn’t know I was alive until the reaping."

Sounds of sympathy from the crowd. Unrequited love they can relate to.

She have another fellow?" asks Caesar.

I don’t know, but a lot of boys like her," says Peeta.

So, here’s what you do. You win, you go home. She can’t turn you down then, eh?" says Caesar encouragingly.

I don’t think it’s going to work out. Winning...won’t help in my case," says Peeta.

Why ever not?" says Caesar, mystified.

Peeta blushes beet red and stammers out. "Because...because...she came here with me.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

“I'm not Team Gale or Team Peeta. I'm Team Katniss...the core story in the Hunger Games trilogy has less to do with who Katniss ends up with and more to do with who she is - because sometimes, in books and in life, it's not about the romance.

Sometimes, it's about the girl.”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, The Girl Who Was on Fire

“Holmes had cultivated the ability to still the noise of the mind, by smoking his pipe and playing nontunes on the violin. He once compared this mental state with the sort of passive seeing that enables the eye, in a dim light or at a great distance, to grasp details with greater clarity by focusing slightly to one side of the object of interest. When active, strained vision only obscures and frustrates, looking away often permits the eyes to see and interpret the shapes of what it sees. Thus does inattention allow the mind to register the still, small whisper of the daughter of the voice.”
― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice

“There's an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I've been thinking about a lot while writing this essay. In it, Buffy sacrifices her own life to save her sister, and right before she does, she tells her sister that the hardest thing to do in the world is to live - ironic words coming from someone about to kill herself for the greater good. As I'm writing this, I just keep thinking that Katniss never gets to sacrifice herself. She doesn't get the heroic death. She survives - and that leaves her doing the hardest thing in the world: living in it once so many of the ones she loves are gone.”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, The Girl Who Was on Fire