1. “Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even death by violence.” This is a powerful quote because it suggests that everything that has a beginning must come to an end. Nothing last forever, only our memories and even then they’ll disappear along with us.

2. “I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of the night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn’t make yourself over between dawn and dusk.” This is all true and painful at times. During nights like those, your dreams become better than reality, so it makes it even harder to wake up because you have to face the facts right then and there. One night’s sleep isn’t going to make it vanish like a dream does when you wake up.

3. “Sarcasm… the protest of those who are weak.” To gain power, the weak, use this sense of communication to mislead and mock the other person to show them that they are capable of holding just as much power as them, if not more since they just fooled them.

4. “This was the tree, and it seemed to me standing there to resemble those men, the giants of your childhood, whom you encounter years later and find that they are not merely smaller in relation to your growth, but they are absolutely smaller, shrunken by age. In this double demotion the old giants have become pygmies while you were looking the other way.” This couldn’t be more true. All throughout my years of middle school and below, I admired everyone taller than me and respected them out of habit. They were everything to me and all I knew. However, now that I’m in high school, I can look back at all of those whom I swooned over and notice that they are merely human like me and what I thought was so great was ordinary. I have seemed to loose that essence of wonder and admiration that I had when I was younger.

5. “What I mean is, I love winter, and when you really love something, then it loves you back, in whatever way it has to love.” I relate to this quote because when I’m passionate about something I treat it as something more than an inanimate object. Crazily, I too imagine that when you love something so much it simply returns the love by being itself.

6. “But something held me back. Perhaps I was stopped by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth.” I feel like in moments like these you stop and try to comprehend what is all real. You try to differentiate between what is real right now, in this world to what you’ve been told to believe.This moment doesn’t stay with you for very long, but it’s enough to give you that “inner-outer” feeling where you jump out of your feverish skin and look down upon yourself and all the things that you’ve done.

7. “So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all.” A great example for this would be students going to school and following routine everyday being oblivious to what is really going on in the world. There is a constant change lurking among these boys and they don’t even know it.

8. “But I was used to finding something deadly in things that attracted me; there was always something deadly lurking in anything I wanted, anything I loved.” This makes me feel sad for Gene seeing that he believes anything he touches will become deadly. I don’t think that this is true and it’s all in his head. His past experiences are what led him to get to this point and I think, although he shouldn’t forget it, he should keep moving on with his an optimistic mind.

9. “You have to do what you think is the right thing, but just make sure it’s the right thing in the long run, and not just for the moment.” Standing up for yourself and what you believe in is what comes to mind when I read this. And I believe this goes out to everyone who has ever wanted to state their mind on what they believe is right, if you’re going to do that,then make sure it is helpful in the long run.

10. “Because it seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.” I agree with this so much. Wars could never go away because we humans will never extinguish those ignorant feelings we have towards those who don’t believe that same things we do.