“She would not be robbed of her ability to support herself, to do good work in the world, justly, compassionately.”

“He leaned upon her as if there was no other support anywhere in the world, and she held him as if she would undertake no other task for all eternity.”

“It was a good thing that she got herself into this other school. It showed her that there were other worlds beside the world she had been born into and that these other worlds were not unattainable.”

“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.”

“She clung to that which had robbed her, as people do.”

“She had always told herself that she did hti job because she wanted to help others; afterall, hadn't Maurice told her once that the most important question any individual could ask was, "How might I serve?" If her response to that question had been pure, surely she would have coninued with the calling to be a nurse.... But that role hadn't been quite enough for her. She would have missed the excitement, the thrill when she embarked on the work of collecting clues to support a case.”