Rachel

“What if the story were told that way? Shaping narratives. Presenting events in a particular order. It’s what I’ve spent my adult life doing. Whittling stories down into the patterns that the law can see. And all of them written for precisely the same purpose: to justify to the system a person’s fear of returning to the scene of a crime. And yet in that shaping, what violence is done to the fullness of an actual life.”
― Adam Haslett, Mothers and Sons

“After the Games comes the fallout from the Games. Spreading out like ripples in a pond when you toss in a rock. Concentric circles of damage, washing over the dead tributes’ families, their friends, their neighbors, to the ends of the district. Those in closest get hit the worst. White liquor and depression, broken families and violence and suicide. We never really recover, just move on the best we can.”
― Suzanne Collins, Sunrise on the Reaping

“There is no sorrow like the memory of love and the knowledge that it is gone forever”
― Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon

“His mind could fixate on a problem like that — anything, really — and not let go. As if controlling one element of his world would keep him from ruin. It was a bad habit that blinded him to other things that could harm him. A tendency towards obsession was hardwired into his brain and would likely be his undoing if he couldn't learn to outsmart it.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes