How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Once he and Roy had watched a man and woman in the basement of a condemned house. They did it standing up. The woman had wanted fifty cents, and the man had flashed a razor. (1.1.4)
John and his brother see a couple having sex near their home, and they get an early lesson in sex's unfortunate (and grody) relationship to commerce and violence. In their society, sex is often related to the exchange of money, and it is also dangerous and can have potentially deadly consequences.
Quote #2
And his mother and father, who went to church on Sundays, they did it too, and sometimes John heard them in the bedroom behind him, over the sound of rats' feet, and rat screams, and the music and cursing from the harlot's house downstairs. (1.1.6)
John's parents are married, so it shouldn't be so bad for them to have sex together. But look at the sound images that are stacked up next to it: "rats' feet" (eew), "rat screams (double eew), "music" (mood music is cool), and "cursing from the harlot's house downstairs" (um, that doesn't sound good). The poverty, filth, and violence that these sounds convey gives us a clue as to how John considers his parents' bedroom activities.
Quote #3
And as Father James spoke of the sin that he knew they had not committed yet, of the unripe fig plucked too early from the tree—to set the children's teeth on edge—John found himself grow dizzy in his seat and could not look at Elisha where he stood, beside Ella Mae, before the altar. (1.1.19)
Father James calls Elisha and Ella Mae's sin (which is just a potential sin, by the way; this is a preemptive strike against sexual sin) an unripe fig; the image is of a fruit that isn't ready to be picked, which is the teenagers' sexuality. If they pick it too early (go to bed before they're married) it won't be good to eat (uhhh… we'll let you fill in that part of the metaphor).
Quote #4
After this Sunday Elisha and Ella Mae no longer met each other each day after school, no longer spent Saturday afternoons wandering through Central Park, or lying on the beach. All that was over for them. If they came together again it would be in wedlock. They would have children and raise them in the church. (1.1.21)
Elisha and Ella Mae are young kids who do fun, teenaged things like go to the park or the beach. The potential for sexual contact is, we gotta admit, pretty high, and their meetings are quickly put to an end. Sex is not supposed to be related to recreation, according to Father James; it should be part of marriage, children, and the church.
Quote #5
He had sinned. In spite of the saints, his mother and his father, the warnings he had heard from his earliest beginnings, he had sinned with his hands a sin that was hard to forgive. In the school lavatory, alone, thinking of the boys, older, bigger, braver, who made bets with each other as to whose urine could arch higher, he had watched in himself a transformation of which he would never dare to speak. (1.1.26)
Okay, folks, get ready for some embarrassing moments. John is talking about masturbation. He thinks that his "alone time" is sinful, and it's not clear if it would be bad in general, or if it's especially bad because while he masturbates he thinks of the older boys… a desire that is doubly forbidden to him.
Quote #6
When men looked at Deborah they saw no further than her unlovely and violated body. (2.1.25)
Deborah is the victim of rape, and unfortunately, after this traumatic experience, she must constantly relive it because everyone in the community has reduced her to that moment. For her, sex is violent and ugly, because that is the only sexual experience or attention she has ever received.
Quote #7
"You stink of whisky. Let me alone."
"Ah. I ain't the only one got a tongue. What you got to say to this?" And his hand stroked the inside of her thigh.
"Stop."
"I ain't going to stop. This is sweet talk, baby." (2.1.115-18)
Florence and Frank fight all the time, and their marriage doesn't last. Maybe it's because, just as he does outside of bed, Frank ignores her wishes in bed. She tells him clearly to leave her alone and to stop, and he just refuses, keeping on with what he wants to do without respecting her.
Quote #8
The silence was the silence of the early morning, and he was returning from the harlot's house. (2.2.4)
Gabriel is a good-time guy before he gets saved, which involves lots of drinking and sex. Now that he's saved, however, he looks back on that time with a whole new vocabulary. He sleeps with a woman that he meets one night while he's out partying, and, because he comes to Jesus the next morning, he now thinks of her as a "harlot," or prostitute.
Quote #9
Lord, how they rocked in their bed of sin, and how she cried and shivered; Lord, how her love came down! […] And he touched the tree, hardly knowing that he touched it, out of an impulse to be hidden; and then he cried: "Oh, Lord, have mercy! Oh, Lord, have mercy on me!" (2.2.12)
Even if Gabriel does have a judgmental view on sex, the way he thinks about it almost sounds like a prayer. The repetition of "Lord," sounds like he's praying, just like afterward, when he begs God for mercy. It's like the entire act, from sex to repentance, is all part of the same prayer.
Quote #10
Sometimes, leaning over the cracked, "tattle-tale gray" bathtub, he scrubbed his father's back; and looked, as the accursed son of Noah had looked, on his father's hideous nakedness. It was secret, like sin, and slimy, like the serpent, and heavy, like the rod. (3.1.22)
In the Bible, Noah's son Ham is cursed because he looks at Noah's naked body while he's passed out, drunk. Many people take this curse to mean that Ham's descendants had black skin, and some have even used it to justify slavery. John makes the curse personal, wondering if he's cursed because he has sneaked a peek at his own father's goods.