How we cite our quotes: (Part.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Touch me, touch me. It was that, and a great swelling of emotion behind it: it was a hunger, a demand, a flood of sweetness and of need. (1.5.7)
Is it Valentine's Day? This passage describes the telepathic call between Evelyn and Lone. It can be taken as a fundamental expression of how More Than Human pictures what friendship is meant to fulfill. Touch, feeding, and sweetness are all specific ways friends fill each other's needs in this book.
Quote #2
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." (1.8.14-16)
Evelyn's first sentence, which occurs very early in the book, sets the stage for friendship to be the force that joins the gestalt individuals together into one life form as the novel progresses. As The Beatles once said, all you need is love.
Quote #3
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 [...], 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)
One way More Than Human sees friendship is as a form of mutual aid or support. The Prodds nurtured Lone, so now he wants to give back by helping the old man move his truck without an expensive horse. Lone creates an anti-gravity generator in the process—and in opposition to much of science fiction, the specifics of the gee-whiz gadget take a back seat in light of the emotions being explored and expressed.