How we cite our quotes: The main text of the story is cited (Chapter.Paragraph). The date headers are not counted as paragraphs. The verses in the chapters with a single passage from the narrator's religious texts are cited (Chapter.Verse.Line#). In chapters with multiple passages, the verses are cited (Chapter.Verse#.Line#). The four section pages with the years and passages are cited (Year.Verse).
Quote #4
Most upsetting to me, though, there were a few more rag, stick, cardboard, and palm frond shacks along the way into the hills along River Street. There always seem to be more. They've never bothered us beyond begging and cursing, but they always stare so. It gets harder to ride past them. They're living skeletons, some of them. Skin and bones and a few teeth. They eat whatever they can find up there. (8.20)
Lauren is commenting on the wretched conditions of the street poor. Perhaps fear of ending up like them is what kept her from leaving Robledo of her own free will. It's a scary world out there, folks.
Quote #5
"You think there'll be more privatized cities?" she asked.
"Bound to be if Olivar succeeds. This country is going to be parceled out as a source of cheap labor and cheap land. When people like those in Olivar beg to sell themselves, our surviving cities are bound to wind up the economic colonies of whoever can afford to buy them." (12.25-26)
This is a conversation between Joanne (who's asking the question) and Lauren (who's responding) shortly before the Garfields leave for Olivar. Lauren is basically identifying the reality that people have become commodities or products to be bought and sold. In fact, those in Olivar are begging to be considered items for sale. For all its ills, money is almost always still required to participate in this world, so people in Parable of the Sower want it desperately.
Quote #6
I walked down the middle of the street looking and listening and trying to avoid potholes and chunks of broken asphalt. There was little other trash. Anything that would burn, people would use as fuel. Anything that could be reused or sold had been gathered. Cory used to comment on that. Poverty, she said, had made the streets cleaner. (14.16)
People who teach fiction-writing sometimes remark upon the importance of the "telling detail"—the piece of vivid description that helps readers feel that they're present at the scene and that helps them feel the author knows what he or she is talking about. This passage is probably a good example of a telling detail: poverty has made these streets cleaner, since the poor salvage everything they can. It's something an author who hasn't grown up around poverty might not think of to include in a description of a poor area, right?