More Than Human Innocence Quotes

Without words [...] Impression, depression, dialogue. Radiations of fear, tense fields of awareness, discontent. Murmuring, sending, speaking, sharing, from hundreds, from thousands of voices. [...] these were the voices of the children, the very young children, who had not yet learned to stop crying to be heard. Only crying, only noises. (1.1.12)

No child was ever so protected from evil as Alicia; and when she joined forces with her father, a mighty structure of purity was created for Evelyn. "Purity triple-distilled," Mr. Kew said to Alicia on her nineteenth birthday. "I know good through the study of evil, and have taught you only the good. And that good teaching has become your good living, and your way of life is Evelyn's star. I know all the evil there is and you know all the evil which must be avoided; but Evelyn knows no evil at all." (1.2.3)

Her naked hands fled to the sides of her neck, not to hide something but to share something. She bent her head and the hands laughed at one another under the iron order of her hair. They found four hooks and scampered down them. Her high collar eased and the enchanted air rushing in with a soundless shout. Evelyn breathed as if she had been running. She put out her hand hesitantly, futilely, patted the grass beside her as if somehow the act might release the inexpressible confusion of delight within her. It would not, and she turned and flung herself face down in bed of early mint and wept because the spring was too beautiful to be borne. (1.2.9)

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)

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)

"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)

"You really hate women. They all know something you don't" [...]

"You haven't given me the other ... whatever it was."

"Oh," he said. "Yeah, that."

He moved like a flash. There was a pressure, a stretching apart, and a ... a breakage. And with a tearing agony and a burst of triumph that drowned the pain, it was done.
(2.12.30-59)

As a group Homo Gestalt can solve his own problems. But as an entity:

He can't have a morality, because he is alone.
An ethic then. "An individual's code for society's survival." He has no society; yet he has. He has no species; he is his own species.

Could he—should he choose a code which would serve all of humanity? (3.16.49-52)

And when there are enough of your kind, your ethics will be their morals. And when their morals no longer suit their species, you or another ethical being will create new ones that vault still farther up the main stream, reverencing you, reverencing those who bore you and the ones who bore them, back and back to the first wild creature who was different because his heart leapt when he saw a star. (3.17.14)