"I was serving as a Trustee with my companion at the time. Guy was headstrong. A loner. The universals under his leadership had stopped offering the shared bond to the Society, wanting to keep their powers to themselves. We were riven with petty feuds and rivalries as a result. I thought I understood him; I, who do not like to mix others out of my element, believed I comprehended his desire to shut his mind away from everyone else. But I was wrong. He shut himself off because he was proud, too proud to share with others even the crumbs from the banquet of his gift."

     The reason I chose this quote is because this is the first time the book talks about the past. Many times through out the series, the author mentions the history of the society without actually giving any real details. This passage gives a much better picture of how the organization was many years ago when universals were common. It also gives a brief description of the ancient rock dwarf Gard, whose past has been long and mysterious. In the sense of discovering what the society and the universals where like sixty plus years ago, this is one of the most important paragraphs in the book series.

     Mr. Masterson had offered his barn for the wedding reception so that as many creatures as possible from the Society could come. A band of young musicians from the Sea Snakes had been hired to provide the entertainment, and the dancing was already well under way. Connie watched from a hay bale as her aunt whirled around in Mack's arms like a white spinning top, her head thrown back in a raucous laugh. Connie could not remember seeing her aunt so happy. Whatever others might think of the marriage, Evelyn was clearly content with her choice.

     There are a few reasons why I liked this paragraph and chose it. For one, it introduces four of the most important characters in the story, Mack, Evelyn, Connie, and Mr. Masterson. That is rare thing to find in the middle of a book. Another reason is that it gives you hints as to what the society is. Which, is what the entire book series is based on. The third reason is because even though this is half-way through the third book, you get a pretty good idea of the characters and story. The last reason is because you can get a brief insight of gossip that was going around the town about the marriage. that gives an idea about how either Mack or Evelyn, or both, are viewed around town.

     I stood before her, my basket in my hands. I felt its edge crush in my grip. The stench was so foul that my eyes watered, making the shape in front of me shift and shimmer in the dim light.
     (...)
     Daisy was smaller than I had expected. From the shoulders down to her haunches she was about the size and shape of a large dog, and her broad paws ended in claws, each as long as my thumb. Her body, covered with reddish scales, curled around to a long, thick tail like a lizard's. But what kept my attention were her heads.

     This passage stuck out the most to me because it introduces, and starts to describe, the most interesting and short lived character. This character go by the name Daisy because nobody can pronouce her full name. She is the child of the sky and the mountain Sami and is the most vile of creatures. When first seen by Telemachos, she is sitting on what appears to be a pile of mud. It's not. She never leaves the cave and never moves. Another interesting thing about her, is that she knows all. You could say she was like the Oracle of Sami. She comes to an untimely when a boulder falls on her.

     He could almost feel someone probing the past, finding their way slowly toward him, stalking him. At any moment the air could shimmer beside the table and an assassin appear, a gun raised, ready to execute him. It was something Kramer constantly feared. The recurring nightmare had troubled him almost every for the last fifteen years-awaking in his bed in the dark stillness of night to see an assassin leaning leaning over him and announcing his immediate execution for traveling through time.
     A soft voice whispered quietly in his head.
     There is a way out for you, you know.
     Suicide?
     No, another way.

     The reason I chose this passage is because it is the turning point of the book. It is where Kramer( the villian) goes insane. He went back in time to rule over the world so that in the future the world would not be populated by mass cities overrun by starving people choking on greenhouse gasses. It started as a noble quest to save humanity. Then the voices appeared and paranoia set in. Amazed at the simplicity of it all, the poor man was driven mad and his once brilliant mind alight with sizzling neon tubes and yellow electric bulbs, blinked out and he fell into madness.

     Liam braced himself against the gradually steepening angle of the floor, holding on to the door frame of the cabin beside him. The chief steward's instructions had been clear to ensure every cabin at this end of the deck was empty before coming up and joining him.
     He wasn't sure he wanted to; the screaming and wailing of women and children that he could hear coming down the stairwell from above sounded shrill and terrifying. At least here on deck E, amid second-class cabins, there was an eerie sense of peace. Not quite silent, though. Far away, he could hear the deep rumble and knew it was the sound of the freezing ocean cascading into the stricken stricken ship, roaring through open bulkheads, gradually pulling her down.

     I really like this short little passage, because it not only describes peace in panic, but also sense of honor in doom. Now this is an account of the titanic sinking, however Liam does not seem panicked or under deres at all. He actually seems calm, he also does not want to go to the evac deck, he would rather stay behind and look for any straggling people. The book says its because he wants avoid the panicking women and children, this, to me, strikes a certain hero cord. My prediction is that these character traits will play a big role in the story to come.

     He was the third brother among the Olympians, who drew from his share the underworld and the rule over the dead. He was also called Pluto, the God of Wealth, of the precious metals hidden in the earth. The Romans as well as the Greeks called him by this name, but often they translated it into Dis, the Latin word for rich. He had a far-famed cap or helmet which made whoever wore it invisible. It was rare that he left his dark realm to visit Olympus or earth, nor was he urged to do so. He was not a welcome visitor. He was unpitying, inexorable, but just; a terrible, not evil god.
     His wife was Persephone whom he carried away from the earth and made Queen of the Lower World.
     He was King of the Dead- not Death himself, whom the Greeks called Thanatos and the Romans, Orcus.

     I chose this passage because I have always liked the story of Hades, and what happened after the Titans, with the Gods. Though I like this short, concise, version of the story, I couldn't help but notice that a few details were left out.
     For one thing , the way the three elder brothers came to control their respective kingdoms, the lots they drew after the titan war. Another detail they left out is how Hades made Persephone his Queen of the dead. He kidnapped her on earth and took her to the underworld where he tricked her into eating six seeds. Because of this she had to stay in the underworld six months out of the year, which she doesn't like so nothing will grow in the winter. There are a few more minor details that aren't worth mentioning.

     Consider. Sethe is an escaped slave, and her children were all born in slave-owning Kentucky; their escape to Ohio is like the Israelites' escape from Egypt in Exodus. Except that this time Pharaoh shows up on the doorstep threatening to drag them back across the Red Sea. So Sethe decides to save her children from slavery by killing them, succeeding with only one of them.
      Later, when that murdered child, the title character of Toni Morrison's Beloved, makes her ghostly return, she's more than simply the child lost to violence, sacraficedto the revulsion of the escaped slave toward her former state. Instead she is one of, in the words of the epigraph to the novel, the "sixty million and more" Africans and African-descended slaves who died in captivity and forced marches on the continent or in the middle passage or in attempts to escape a system that should have been unthinkable- as unthinkable as, for instance, a mother seeing no other means of rescuing her child execpt infanticide. Beloved is in fact representative of the horrors to which a whole race was subjected.

     I chose this passage because it reallt stuck out to me. Not just because it started off with murder and threats of assault, but because of the truth the auther brings to light. The fact that white men were so cruel and unexceptive of different skin colors, that the minorities felt that the only way to escape the abuse was to kill there families. Looking at this passage makes me think about Adolf Hitler. He wanted to create a racially pure Germany and grove the world into war. This passsage begs the question"Where we so different?"

     "I don't really hate Brinker, I don't really hate him, not any more than anybody else." His swimming eyes cautiuosly explored me. The wind lifted a sail of snow and billowed it past us. "It was only-" he drew in his breath so sharply that it made a whistling sound-"the idea of his face on a woman's body. That's what made me psycho. I don't know. I guess they must be right. I guess I am a psycho. I guess I must be. Did you ever have ideas like that?"
     "No."
     "Would they bother you if you did, if you happened to keep imagining a man's head on a women's body, or if sometimes the arm of a chair turned into a human arm if you looked at it too long, things like that? Would they bother you?"
     I didn't say anything.
     "Maybe everbody imagines things like that when they're away from home, really far away, for the first time."

     The reason I chose this passage is because of it's coming of age scene. I relate this conversation to coming of age becuase Leper is homesick and halucinating. It makes me think of how he is growing up too soon. It shows that he needs to grow up and get over his problems like an adult. He is, however too young for the responsibility, yet still has it, and has to take like an adult.

     There were a couple of places now which I wanted to see. Both were fearful sites, and that was why I wanted to see them. So after lunch at Devon Inn I walked back toward the school. It was a raw, nondescript time of year, toward the end of November, the kind of wet, self-pitying November day when every speck of dirt stands out clearly. Devon luckily had very little of such weather-the icy clamp of winter, or the radiant New Hampshire summers, were more characteristic of it-but this day it blew wet, moody gusts all around me.

     I chose this paragraph because it's the first time the character describes the school. It seems to me that Gene has contradicting feelings about the school. He starts off by explaining that there was so much fear there that he didnt know what fear was. Then in this paragraph he seems like he's having warm and fuzzy flashbacks of the weather and different seasons. This section stuck out because of its seemingly contradicting thoughts.

     I never saw this great-uncle, but I'm supposed to look like him with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in fathers office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in the that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center ot the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe-so I decided to go East and  learn the bond buisness. Everybody I knew was in the bond buisness, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, "Why  ye-es," with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

     I chose this paragrph because it stuck out to me as one of the key peices to his past. In just this small section you find that he was in the first World War, that he graduated at New Haven in 1915 and you find that heis story takes place 94 years ago. All this tells me that this is a very important chunk of information.

     It was pretty much my worst nightmare. And believe me, I've had plenty of nightmares. We were marched down the tunnel flanked by dracaenae, with Kelli and the giants in back, just in case we tried to run for it. Nobody seemed to worry about us running forward. That was the direction they wanted us to go.

     I found this description kind of funny. However, in order to understand the humor of it, you must read the book. I will tell you yhis, the giants are cannibals and Kelli is a cheerleader. From just that little bit of information, you should be able to find something funny about this paragragh. The book is called, Percy Jackson and the Olympians Book Four: Battle of the Labyrinth, enjoy.

     He remembered how some of the men had run from the battle. As he recalled their terror-struck faces he felt scorn for them. They had surley been more fleet and more wild than was absolutely necessary. They were weak mortals. As for himself, he had fled with descretion and dignity.

     This passage was a little unsettling to me. For one the boy is a hypocrite. He himself ran from the battle, wheather he did it wildly or not, he still ran and that makes him no better than them he shuns. Another thing is he called them weak mortals. That makes him sound like he is above them, like he is a god that can't do wrong. This guy needs to a big dose of reallity.

     They staggerd after Luke, but it was too late. Everybody converged on the creek as Luke ran across into friendly territory. Our side exploded into cheers. The red banner shimmered and turned to silver. The boar and spear were replaced with a huge caduceus, the symbol of cabin eleven. Everybody on the blue team picked up Luke and started carrying him around on their shoulders. Chiron cantered out from the woods and blew the conch horn.

     They ran after the stag, they had missed, but it had disappeared into the woods. As everybody gathered around, murmuring could be heard through the group. Most were complaining about not getting a shot. The elders of the group knew the situation was much more dier than that. If the men did not get food soon, the village would starve. As if the drout had'nt been bad enough, the game was  growing scarce. The men heard the warning horn and quickly ran back to the collection of huts. One climbed the watch tower to see, what looked like, a swarm of ant in the distance. It was the tribe from the valley.

     During the California Gold Rush, a man by the name Levi Strauss had an idea. Mr. Strauss needed to make some money when he got to California, so he started to make jeans out of wagon canvise. His pants became a hit and he got the money he needed. He did not know it at the time, but he started one of the best jean companies in the history of the U.S. What started as a hopeless plan to make some extra dough, became a multi-million dollar company.