“I tried on Claire's double strand of pearls in the mirror, ran the smooth, lustrous beads through my fingers, touched the coral rose of the clasp. The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.”

“The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart.”

“Do you know how a pearl comes to be?""Oysters make them, from a bit of sand.""Aiyah. From a bit of sand." He rolled the pearl between his fingers. "All pearls begin as something unpleasant that the oysters cannot expel from themselves, even though they may want to. So they embrace these things that will not leave them, shaping them and smoothing away the sharp edges, until over time, they make of these unwanted things great treasures.”

“Napoleon built his campaigns of iron and when one piece broke the whole structure collapsed. I made my campaigns using rope, and if a piece broke I tied a knot”

“When I was talking to Alfie I always knew exactly what he meant, but when I thought about his words later I could only grasp at the meaning like it was water running through my fingers, leaving the ghosts of utterances lying naked in the shapes of pools on my palms. I picked them to pieces, whispered them and cradled their shapes in my teeth just to hold them in the air later and string them together like pearls on a necklace. I wore it like a rosary, wrapping the pearls of his words around the knots in my fingers and counting all the ways we had tried to say the same thing and missed.”

“My mockingjay pin now lives with Cinna's outfit, but there's the gold locket and the silver parachute with the spile and Peeta's pearl. I knot the pearl into the corner of the parachute, bury it deep in the recesses of the bag, as if it's Peeta's life and no one can take it away as long as I guard it.”