In Hollywood, I'm obese. I'm considered a fat actress. I'm never going to starve myself for a part. I keep waiting for that one role to come along that scares me enough into dieting, and it just can't happen. I'm invincible. I don't want little girls to be like, 'Oh, I want to look like Katniss so I'm going to skip dinner.' That's something I was really conscious of during training. I was trying to get my body to look fit and strong, not thin and underfed.

That the Careers have been better fed growing up is actually to their disadvantage,
because they don’t know how to be hungry. Not like Rue and I do.

Let the Seventy-forth Hunger Games begin, Cato, I think. Let them begin for real.

You're still trying to protect me. Real or not real," he whispers.
"Real," I answer. "Because that's what you and I do, protect each other.

My love for these books, at its purest, is not really about Peeta or anything silly and girly. I love that a young woman character is fierce and strong but hum in ways I find believable, relatable. Katniss is clearly a heroine, but a heroine with issues. She intrigues me because she never seems to know her own strength. She isn't blandly insecure the way girls are often forced to be in fiction. She is brave but flawed. She is a heroine, but she is also a girl who loves two boys and can't choose which boy she loves more. She is not sure she is up to the task of leading a revolution, but she does her best, even as she doubts herself.

Katniss endures the unendurable. She is damaged and it shows. At times, it might seem like her suffering is gratuitous, but life often presents unendurable circumstances people manage to survive. Only the details differ. The Hunger Games trilogy is dark and brutal, but in the end, the books also offer hope - for a better world and a better people and, for one woman, a better life, a life she can share with a man who understands her strength and doesn't expect her to compromise that strength, a man who can hold her weak places and love her through the darkest of her memories, the worst of her damage. Of course I love the Hunger Games. The trilogy offers the tempered hope that everyone who survives something unendurable hungers for.

Winning will make you famous. Losing means certain death.