suzanne collins is such a genius… the cultural phenomena of her series leading to the hanging tree house remixes, mockingjay being milked for two (bad) movies, the capitol-inspired makeup palettes, the halloween costumes, the explosion of the market for dystopia, the butchering of her characters and removal of disabilities, disfiguration, and racial tension + representation to sell more tickets, the extra gale scenes to fuel discourse, and the audience showing up to cinemas to watch what was pretty honestly marketed to them (the jacob vs edwardification of the symbolic love story and also to watch children fight to the death) it’s just so ridiculously ironic i would say you can’t write this shit, but she did write about it… in The Hunger Games published 2008
I love that in Catching fire Katniss comes to the conclusion the other tributes are trying to keep Peeta alive because they must see how amazingly perfectly wonderful he is. When in actuality that’s just her having a crush and everyone else recognizing that if Peeta gets hurt Katniss will go fully feral and unhinged and probably try to kill everyone and then herself.
i dont know how else to put this but to approach books (or any media, really) solely for the sake of relatability is genuinely incredibly heartbreaking……to have such little (or such unwilling) imaginative scope that you cannot stretch yourself, even marginally, in a different direction to what you’ve known or are used to knowing when the very POINT of stories is to transport you somewhere else, into someone else, so you can do just that……..when fran lebowiz said a book “is supposed to be a door!” and george saunders said good prose “is like empathy training wheels” they were right!!! they were so so so SO absolutely entirely right!!!!!
“"I loved you completely, and you loved me the same,” she said, “that’s all.” And this was the point I wanted the most to make. That at the end of our life, if we can say this about each other, the rest doesn’t matter. It’s the love that stays.“
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“I’m in the hallway again, I’m in the hallway. The radio’s playing my favorite song. Leave the lights on. Keep talking. I’ll keep walking toward the sound of your voice.”
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“you can’t take loved away. time and death and mistakes take people from you, but nothing and no one can take back that love… everything changes irreversibly with every second that passes, but nothing and no one can change the fact that i was loved and i loved back… you can’t take it away from me. i was loved. i was loved.”
“At the root of every ghost, a yearning. A tug, in which a living person reaches so fervently toward something absent, that the absence becomes bodied. As anyone who has known loss understands full well, lack is not in fact, an absence at all. It is a presence. A person we love dies, or leaves, or changes, and a gap forms. It takes on their shape. Mimics their movement. Echoes their voice like a mockingbird. We feel this gap take up space, filling every place our lost one once was, and now isn’t. It reflects in mirrors. Flickers in candle flames. A phantom.”
The Amazing Devil, Inkpot Gods//Jamie Anderson//Haunting of Hill House//twitter user @tothedeaths//Lang Leav, Memories//@boymartyr//Mike Flanagan//Xie Lei, Blow//Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd (tr. Christina MacSweeney)//Haunting of Hill House//Richard Silken, You Are Jeff//Henri Nouwen//Spiritfarer//@boymiffy & @petrichara//Amanda Lovelace, to drink coffee with a ghost//Max LL, What You Leave Behind//@nickyandmikey//The Newton Brothers//@wifegideonnav//Shannon Barry//GennaRose Nethercott, “A Ghost Is a Memory.” On Bodies, Belief, and the Places Ghost Stories Live
[text ID: My mind is filled with cataclysm and apocalypse: I wish for earthquakes, eruptions, flood. Only that seems large enough to hold all of my rage and grief. I want the world overturned like a bowl of eggs, smashed at my feet.]