How we cite our quotes: (Part.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Men turned away from him, women would not look, children stopped and watched him. It did not seem to matter to the idiot. He expected nothing from any of them. (1.1.2)
This line launches Lone's loneliness. Pardon all the L's. Point is, Lone starts off the story detached from everyone else due to his "idiocy," strangeness, and lack of expectations for others. If that's not lonely, we don't know what is.
Quote #2
It was all there, waiting for that single symbol, a name. All the wandering, the hunger, the loss, the thing which is worse than loss, called back. There was a dim and subtle awareness that even here, with the Prodds, he was not a something, but a substitute for something.
All alone. [...]
"Lone?" said Prodd. [...]
It could be seen that the syllable meant something to Prodd, something like the codification he offered, though far less.
But it would do. (1.11.5-12)
Tearjerker. This passage sums up Lone's isolated life pretty well. He's so lonely that he can only come away with a partial version of the name he wants.
Quote #3
There were two boys for whom the smell of disinfectant on tile was the smell of hate.
For Gerry Thompson it was the smell of hunger, too, and of loneliness. All food was spiced with it, all sleep permeated with disinfectant, hunger, cold, fear . . . all components of hatred. (1.12.1-2)
Loneliness is certainly cast as a bad thing here, so bad that it is even identified as a source of hatred. This passage shows us that Gerry's loneliness at the orphanage is one of the root causes of his hatred, a defining force of his character.
Quote #4
At one time it had not mattered in the least to Lone whether he was near men or not. Now, he wanted only to be able to be what he knew he was—alone. But eight years at the farm had changed his way of life. He needed shelter. (1.24.4)
After leaving the Prodds, Lone gets even lonelier than before. At the beginning of the book, he simply didn't care one way or the other about others. Now he wants to stand apart and even build a shelter to be alone in. This guy is what we call a rugged individualist, like Han Solo or Jack Sparrow.
Quote #5
Alone. Lone Lone alone. Prodd was alone now and Janie was alone and the twins, well they had each other but they were like one split person who was alone. He himself, Lone, was still alone, it didn't make any difference about the kids being there.
Maybe Prodd and his wife had not been alone. He wouldn't have any way of knowing about that. But there was nothing like Lone anywhere in the world except right here inside him. The whole world threw Lone away, you know that? Even the Prodds did, when they got around to it. Janie got thrown out, the twins too, so Janie said.
Well, in a funny way it helps to know you're alone, thought Lone. (1.26.29-31)
Some change is afoot here. Lone feels the presence of Janie and the twins makes no difference to his loneliness, but he's also identifying something they four have in common. Maybe before he'd get picked last for the sports team, but now he knows three other people would get picked last along with him. Strength in numbers—it's definitely a thing.
Quote #6
Prodd and his wife had shucked him off when he was in the way, after all those years, and that meant they were ready to do it the first year and the second and the fifth—all the time, any time. You can't say you're a part of anything, anybody, that feels free to do that to you. (1.29.14)
Lone is deciding that a group who kicks you out for no reason never really accepted you in the first place. This guy would probably be a wizard at surviving high school cliques.
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.
Quote #10
Still young, still brilliant as ever, but surrounded by puzzling rejection, Lieutenant Barrows found himself with too much spare time, and he hated it [...] The Lieutenant, in one of his detested idle moments, went rummaging into some files [...] (3.9.64-3.10.2)
Hip is the thinker who saves the day by teaching the gestalt an ethic. This passage shows where he gets his brain-power from. To put it simply, he hates being bored, so when he risks falling into that state, he finds something to think about. That is what gets him through the rejection he faces in the Air Force. The brain is a wonderful thing.