“Tonight. After the reaping, everyone is supposed to celebrate. And a a lot of people do, out of relief that their children have been spared for another year. But at least two families will pull their shutters, lock their doors, and try to figure out how they will survive the painful weeks to come.”

“In normal families, unbroken families, the mother and the father are like two hands cupped together, and held by those hands are the children. In my family, the hands have pulled apart and the children have been dropped. If one parent isn’t looking after you, they just assume the other one is. You find out you don’t really belong anywhere.”

“In the meantime, I would work in the relief office and I began interviewing people . . . and found out how everybody, in order to be eligible for relief, had to have reached absolute bottom. You didn’t have to have a lot of brains to realize that once they reached that stage and you put them on an allowance of a dollar a day for food—how could they ever pull out of it?”

“When push comes to shove, I’m going to figure out that this door needs to be pulled to be opened.”

“The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.”

“Kids aren't supposed to have to figure out how to be happy. They just are.”