How we cite our quotes: (Part.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #7
What am I doing? What am I doing? he thought wildly. Trying and trying like this to find out what I am and what I belong to. . . . Is this another aspect of being outcast, monstrous, different?
"Ask Baby what kind of people are all the time trying to find out what they are what they belong to."
"He says, every kind." (1.29.29-31)
Ah, loneliness. A universal human condition, More Than Human says, via Baby the know-it-all infant.
Quote #8
To dance alone where no one knew, that was the single thing I hid to myself when I was known as Miss Kew, that Victorian, older than her years, later than her time; correct and starched, lace and linen and lonely. Now indeed I would be all they said, through and through, forever and ever, because he had robbed me of the one thing I dared to keep secret." (2.11.6)
Poor Miss Alicia Kew. Lone noticed her secret dancing, and now she feels she will forever be lonely. Thanks a lot, Lone. Note that it was the privacy of her dancing that allowed her to emotionally bond with her deceased sister Evelyn, even if only in her imagination. The novel is expressing the paradoxical-seeming fact that the ability to be alone sometimes helps you share other moments with people.
Quote #9
"You and the kids are a single creature. Unique. Unprecedented." He pointed the pipestem at me. "Alone." (2.14.40)
Stern points out to his patient, Gerry, the fundamental problem of the gestalt. No matter how many people-parts it has, it is still one-of-a-kind and thus suffering from the same ailment of loneliness as the characters did individually before joining up.