How we cite our quotes: (Part.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
When he had been there a year, Mrs. Prodd remembered and baked him a cake. Impulsively she put four candles on it. [...]
He bent his head and blew. They laughed together and rose and came to him, and Prodd thumped his shoulder and Mrs. Prodd kissed his cheek.[...]
He cried. [...]
In its own time, the weeping stopped. Sniffling, he looked at them each in turn. Something new was in his face; it was as if the bronze mask over which his facial skin was stretched had disappeared. "I'm sorry," Prodd said. "Reckon we did something wrong."
"It wasn't wrong," said his wife. "You'll see." (1.10.3-9)
Aww, shucks. This passage shows that compassion can be so overwhelming for a recipient who isn't used to it that the recipient can cry. The Prodds' compassion also pushes Lone to evolve.
Quote #2
She said aloud, in admiration, "Ho-ho . . ." There was no anger left in her. Four days ago the twins couldn't even reach a six-foot sill. They couldn't even get away from a spanking. And now look. (1.17.21)
He-he! Ho-ho! Admiration for the twins' self-teaching inspires Janie to forge the beginnings of empathy for them.
Quote #3
She had the status of provider and she had failed them [...]
Unbidden, an image appeared to him—Mrs. Prodd, a steaming platter of baked ham flanked by the orange gaze of perfect eggs, saying, "Now you set right down and have some breakfast." An emotion he was unequipped to define reached up from his solar plexus and tugged at his throat. [...]
He put one hand on each side of the door and sent his flat harsh voice hurtlint out: "Wait!" (1.25.38-41)
Okay, this is weird, but imagine compassion as a virus. The Prodds infected Lone by showing him compassion by serving him a meal. He then passes on the contagion to Janie and the twins by offering them some of his meal. It's good to be sick this way!
Quote #4
Lone built the device. He did it, not because he was particularly interested in the thing for itself, nor because he wished to understand its principles (which were and would always be beyond him), but only because an old man who had taught him something he could not name was mad with bereavement and needed to work and could not afford a horse. (1.28.36)
Xtreme Compassion. The fact that the anti-gravity generator is the only advanced device in this novel shows that emotions like compassion are more central to the book than technology.
Quote #5
"Are you a good psychotherapist?"
"I think so," he said. "Whom did you kill?"
The question caught me absolutely off guard. "Miss Kew," I said. Then I started to cuss and swear. "I didn't mean to tell you that."
"Don't worry about it," he said. "What did you do it for?"
"That's what I came here to find out."
"You must have really hated her."
I started to cry. Fifteen years old and crying like that! (2.9.23-31)
Stern shows the compassion a good psychotherapist must have for a patient to change. Gerry reveals specifics of a murder he committed and Stern doesn't even flinch, let alone condemn him. The psychotherapist shows compassion instead. We're in awe.
Quote #6
But this was no seduction, this close intimacy of meals and walks and long shared silences, with never a touch, never a wooing word. Lovemaking, even the suppressed and silent kind, is a demanding thing, a thirsty and yearning thing. Janie demanded nothing. She only . . . she only waited. If her interest lay in his obscured history she was taking a completely passive attitude, merel placing herself to receive what he might unearth. (3.7.8)
Quick! What's the difference between compassion and love? Well, Janie freely gives her compassion to help heal Hip by showing him patience, whereas, the passage points out, love is a craving that demands certain responses urgently.
Quote #7
Who am I to make positive conclusions about morality, and codes to serve all of humanity?
Why—I am the son of a doctor, a man who chose to serve mankind, and who was positive that this was right. And he tried to make me serve in the same way, because it was the only rightness he was sure of. And for this I have hated him all my life . . . I see now, Dad, I see! (3.16-54-55)
Yep, this theme is compassion and forgiveness. Here's some forgiveness for you: Hip finds worth in what his cold father did. The forgiveness is important enough that it drives Hip to create the ethos that saves the day at the end of the novel. We're sure Pops would be proud.
Quote #8
You want to be wanted. You want to be needed. So do I. [...]
So nobody wants you and you are a monster.
Nobody wanted me when I was a monster.
But Gerry, there is another kind of code for you [...]
Help humanity, Gerry [...]
I was a monster and I found this ethos. You are a monster. It's up to you. (3.17.6-15)
Hip forges a bond with Gerry by pointing out their similarities to him, which is quite the empathic thing to do. Hip then leaves the choice up to Gerry, compassionately respecting the gestalt head's autonomy that must come into play for the ethos to truly work.
Quote #9
"God," said Gerry into his hands. "What I've done . . . the things I could have. . . ."
"The things you can do," Hip reminded him gently. "You've paid quite a price for the things you've done."
Gerry looked around at the huge glass room and everything in it that was massive, expensive, rich. "I have?"
Hip said, from the scarred depths of memory, "People all around you, you by yourself." He made a wry smile. "Does a superman have super-hunger, Gerry? Super-loneliness?"
Gerry nodded, slowly. "I did better when I was a kid." He shuddered. "Cold. . . . "
Hip did not know what kind of cold he meant, and did not ask. (3.19.9-14)
It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a superman gestalt! Hip, a homo sapiens, reaches into his own scarred past of being brilliant but monstrous to find what it must be like for a homo gestalt to be alone: super-loneliness. That's how Hip finds the compassion to reassure Gerry about possibilities for his future. Finally, he respects Gerry's pain enough to let him feel it in privacy by not asking what he meant by the word cold. Cold soup? Or a cold soul?
Quote #10
Their memories, their projections and computations flooded in to Gerry, until at last he knew their nature and their function; and he knew why the ethos he had learned was too small a concept. For here at last was power which could not corrupt; for such an insight could not be used for its own sake, or against itself. Here was why and how humanity existed, troubled and dynamic, sainted by the touch of its own great destiny. Here was the witheld hand as thousands died, when by their death millions might live. And here, too, was the guide, the beacon, for such times as humanity might be in danger; here was the Guardian of Whom all humans knew—not an exterior force, nor an awesome Watcher in the sky, but a laughing thing with a human heart and reverence for its human origins, smelling of sweat and new-turned earth rather than suffused with the pale odor of sanctity. (3.21.27)
If you write a novel and make the ultimate guardian of humanity (Homo Gestalt)a laughing thing with a human heart rather than something filled withstrict rules like those of Doctor Barrows or Miss Kew—then you've written a book in which compassion and forgiveness play a huge role.