How we cite our quotes: (Paragraph)
Quote #1
The world needs something from each of us, and what the world needs from you is gnomes and whirligigs and furniture. (575)
Mr. Jacks may or may not believe that what the world really needs from Will is gnomes, but perhaps gnomes and such aren't really what Mr. Jacks is talking about. Maybe what he really means is that the world needs Will.
Quote #2
What is wrong with people that they are doomed to repeat what has come before? Helpless? Is that what they believe? That they are locked into a pattern of behavior that was established perhaps before they were born? (410)
Do you think Will is really talking about other people here? Or does it seem more like he's talking about himself? After all, while he isn't repeating his parents' mistakes, per say, he is carrying them forward in his refusal to move on with his life.
Quote #3
A gnome is a gnome is a gnome. (556)
Despite Mr. Jacks's enthusiasm for his gnomes, Will just can't seem to muster any himself. And yet he makes them over and over again. Will may wonder about the purpose of his life, but that doesn't mean he isn't living it out at the same time he wonders what it is.
Quote #4
One day you had parents of a sort and the next day you didn't. That stuff happens to people every stinking day. (567)
This is generally how it goes with death—one day someone's there, the next day they aren't—but Will's insistence that the loss of his parents doesn't really matter (he treats it like it's ordinary here, when a murder-suicide totally isn't) is one of the ways he holds himself back from really experiencing his life.
Quote #5
And there is your monument to the meaning of it all.
Which is?
Will? (620-622)
So anticlimactic, right? Just when we think we're going to get a straight answer from Will about what matters to him… he goes and just asks more questions, only to leave them unanswered.
Quote #6
When people go, they take the whole story with them. (851)
If people's lives are stories, then here Will seems to be saying that they die with the people who live them.
Quote #7
And in the end, and the beginning and all the days in between, isn't that really what it is anyway? That you are with yourself alone.
People are nearby, in front of your face, or working shoulder to shoulder, but they are never really with you, are they? (614-615)
Life sure sounds lonely when you put it this way, Will.
Quote #8
"Life is a gift. Only you can't return it if it doesn't fit right. You just grow into it." (1231)
Angela makes an excellent point here—one that Will sorely needs to get through his thick skull. He has this life, and he can either resent it for its imperfections or accept it and figure out how to make it work for him.