You will therefore not be reading on these pages any witty reworkings of the famous first and final lines of the novel that lives on forever in the syllabuses of eighth-grade English classes: no nasty variations on the old "best of times, worst of times" dichotomy or those noble words of self-sacrifice about "a far, far better thing".
The Hunger Games is an engaging story about self sacrifice, love, and survival in a post-apocalyptic world.
So it's about self-sacrifice, it's about yearning, it's about limbo and assessing your life from wanting to change but not being able to because there's so much at stake.
With four fences down and 104 penalty points conceded, Spence's hopes of Olympic success - built up over four long years since failing to qualify in Beijing, the product of thousands of hours of training and self-sacrifice, fantasised about since childhood - had disappeared in under two minutes.
Ingrid Gottlicher's simple stylized costumes are part of the production's attempt to universalize a message about self-sacrifice for the community and the moral good.
But this week's killing in Syria of a brave Dutch Jesuit priest, reported by our sister blog Pomegranate, seemed to generate yet another idea about self-sacrifice for a noble purpose.
Instead, Rick was sitting in the RV waiting and shouting encouraging words about self-sacrifice for the people at home, even if that meant ignoring signs that they were in imminent danger.
Much of Germany's post-World War II success has been the result of the renowned industriousness and self-sacrifice of its people, about which novelist Günter Grass, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1999, remarked, "To be a German is to make the impossible possible".
Why was that "W" word popping up with this W.? Was it the bad luck of drawing this particular opponent, someone who can speak knowingly about self-sacrifice to spoiled boomers, while W. can only embrace such notions as distant ideals?
The tale is about the self-sacrifice of a female pearl diver who dives deeper than ever before, pursued by the Divine Dragon.
There has been nothing soft about the courage and self-sacrifice of the rescue workers, or the resolve of people across the country to wage war on terrorism.
