How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"'That's a real coincidence because I was thinking about Phoenix myself. I even got the Phoenix paper. They have lots of opportunities there. Seattle too. What do you think about Seattle?'" (4.21)
Phoenix? Seattle? Hey, let's just throw darts at a map! Mom literally doesn't know where she wants to go. So how can they feel like they have a home?
Quote #2
"'Is he coming too?' 'Not if I can help it, he isn't.'" (4.24-25)
This is the day after Roy talked about having a kid with her. So there's a wee bit of instability in their lives.
Quote #3
"Mrs. Taylor had filled the house with pictures of him." (5.6)
"Him" is Mrs. Taylor's husband who disappeared during the war. Jack wants a home, but here he's telling us that homes can be really sad and depressing places full of ghosts and bad memories. Pretty tough nut to crack.
Quote #4
"It wasn't really a house, but half of a barracks where German prisoners of war had been quartered." (8.7)
Because nothing says "loving home" like a place where they used to chain Nazis to their beds.
Quote #5
"He brought home a trunkful of paint in five-gallon cans. All of it was white." (11.37)
"Eye-frying white," in point of fact. The symbolism here is pretty obvious. Dwight wants to erase the abuse and dysfunction and general family ickiness in order to start a new life with Jack's mom. So paint the house over white. Now it's all clean and shiny, and none of that awful rot can ever creep in again.
Quote #6
"Dwight got the spirit that year. He made a wreath for the door and hung pine boughs all over the living room." (17.6)
Dwight's efforts to make a perfect home echo Jack's attempts to reinvent himself as a new person. Could that be part of why Jack hates Dwight so much: that he sees a lot of himself in Dwight and doesn't like it?
Quote #7
"I was happy that night, listening to them search for me, listening to them call my name. I knew they wouldn't find me. After they went I lay there smiling in my perfect place." (20.48)
What does it say that Jack feels most at home lying alone in a gully? Besides the fact that a "real" home isn't comforting for him, he seems to feel that being alone—but still wanted by others—is the closest thing to home for him.
Quote #8
"With me out of the way, there was nothing left to hold her, nothing but threats." (25.13)
This sounds a lot like the emptiness that a home is supposed to fill. Under the surface impressions and facades, there's nothing inside Dwight's home that matters.
Quote #9
"My Scout uniform hanging in the closet was the only sign that I had ever lived there." (28.7)
Jack expresses his lack of a home in a pretty subtle way here. He passed through Dwight's home like a ghost and left nothing behind… not even pictures like Mrs. Taylor's dead husband.
Quote #10
"We would all be together again, as we were meant to be." (31.14)
At the very end, Jack expresses his hope of finding a real home, with his mom and dad, the way he thinks real homes are supposed to be. It's pretty sad because his dad gets committed and his mom is still flighty: there's just not a "real" home in the cards for him…