More Than Human Innocence Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Part.Section.Paragraph)

Quote #4

Evelyn said, "What is it called when a person needs a . . . person . . . when you want to be touched and the . . . two are like one thing and there isn't anything else at all anywhere?"

Alicia, who had read books, thought about it. "Love," she said at length. She swallowed. "It's a madness. It's bad."

Evelyn's quiet face was suffused with a kind of wisdom. "It isn't bad," she said. "I had it." [...]

"There it is, there it is, can't you see? The love, with the sun on its body!" (1.8.14-26)

Evelyn is an innocent, which is why she could send the telepathic call to Lone before this passage. Her innocence also means that, through her connection with nature, she can find love and recognize it as a good thing, even though she was never taught the idea by anyone. Darn you, nature! Ruining Mr. Kew's plans like a fly in his soup.

Quote #5

An idiot, she had said, was grown person who could hear only babies' silent speech. Then—what was the creature with whom he had merged on that terrible day?

"Ask Baby what is a grown person who can talk like the babies."

"He says, an innocent."

He had been an idiot who could hear the soundless murmur. She had been an innocent who, as an adult, could speak it. (1.29.20-23)

Evelyn was nude, and in More Than Human that makes people a wonderful, strange sort of innocent. They can talk the language of telepathic emotional calls and sing with all the voices of the mountains.

Quote #6

"Ask Baby what if an idiot and an innocent are close together."

"He says when they so much as touched, the innocent would stop being an innocent and the idiot would stop being an idiot."

He thought, an innocent is the most beautiful thing there can be. Immediately he demanded of himself, What's so beautiful about an innocent? And the answer, for once almost as swift as Baby's: It's the waiting that's beautiful.

Waiting for the end of innocence. And an idiot is waiting for the end of idiocy too, but he's ugly doing it. So each ends himself in the meeting, in exchange for a merging.

Lone was suddenly deep-down glad. For if this was true, he had made something, rather than destroyed something . . . and when he had lost it, the pain of the loss was justified. When he had lost the Prodds the pain wasn't worth it. (1.29.24-28)

Aww. Lone is saying that both he and Evelyn benefitted from their merging, and it was worth it. But the pain from losing the Prodds, who only accepted him as a temporary replacement for Jack, wasn't worth it. We wonder what Evelyn would have to say about this, seeing as how she didn't make it out of merging with Lone alive.