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 #1
Crazy to live without a wall to protect you. Even in Robledo, most of the street poor—squatters, winos, junkies, homeless people in general—are dangerous. They're desperate or crazy or both. That's enough to make anyone dangerous. (2.20)
Sometimes, writers and pundits romanticize the street poor. The homeless, they might say, are mostly virtuous people who are suffering from a lack of charity or justice on the part of the rest of society. That's not what Lauren observes here. She sees that most—most, not all—of the street poor are a threat to her. They're dangerous because they're desperate and sometimes crazy. Lauren intends to survive and succeed, and that means she can't afford any illusions.
Quote #2
There's a big, early-season storm blowing itself out in the Gulf of Mexico. [...] There are over 700 known dead so far. [...] That's nature. Is it God? Most of the dead are the street poor who have nowhere to go and who don't hear the warnings until it's too late for their feet to take them to safety. Where's safety for them anyway? Is it a sin against God to be poor? We're almost poor ourselves. There are fewer and fewer jobs among us, more of us being born, more kids growing up with nothing to look forward to. One way or another, we'll all be poor some day. The adults say things will get better, but they never have. How will God—my father's God—behave toward us when we're poor? (2.45)
In this passage, Lauren considers the treatment of the poor. Not unlike the Katrina tragedy in real life, the poor in Lauren's near-future United States didn't hear warnings soon enough to escape a natural disaster. It all makes Lauren think that people view it as a sin to be poor (and in the United States, a lot of people do), and she also thinks that poverty is getting worse countrywide.
Later in the book, Lauren's solution is for people to turn to God, namely her God, change. That word is indeed very powerful as a motivator—just think of Barack Obama's successful 2008 presidential campaign, which in the face of an economic crash used the word change (along with hope) as a way to rally support.
Quote #3
I like Curtis Talcott a lot. Maybe I love him. Sometimes I think I do. He says he loves me. But if all I had to look forward to was marriage to him and babies and poverty that just keeps getting worse, I think I'd kill myself. (8.9)
Lauren's a clear-eyed person: instead of just romanticizing Curtis, she also thinks about his strategic value to her. She says he can offer her only babies and poverty, which will keep getting worse, so maybe it's no wonder that Lauren focuses on Earthseed instead as something to give herself a mission with.
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?
Quote #7
For the street poor, unable to afford medical care, even a minor wound might be fatal.
I am one of the street poor, now. Not as poor as some, but homeless, alone, full of books and ignorant of reality. Unless I meet someone from the neighborhood, there's no one I can afford to trust. No one to back me up. (14.24-25)
So right here we've got a big gigantic dividing line in Lauren's life. Before, she wasn't poor, but now she is. Robledo has been destroyed, and the fearsome outside world with all the poor people is now her world: she's now one of the street poor herself. Crossing economic class divides can be one of the most perspective-altering events in life—so from this point forward, we get to see how Lauren acts, and whether she puts into practice the beliefs that she wrote in her journal back when she was safer in Robledo.
Quote #8
I stopped in front of our house and stared at the five adults and the child who were picking through the ruins of it. Who were these vultures? Did the fire draw them? Is that what the street poor do? Run to fire and hope to find a corpse to strip? (14.47)
It's her first day into being poor, and already Lauren's surprised by the actions of other poor. They're scavenging at the ruins of her home, taking whatever they can. She's not really in much of a position to be judgmental about it, either: soon enough, she'll find herself scavenging as well. It's something she learns more about once she teams up with Zahra.
Quote #9
"She died for us," the scavenger woman had said of the green face. Some kind of insane burn-the-rich movement, Keith had said. We've never been rich, but to the desperate, we looked rich. We were surviving and we had our wall. Did our community die so that addicts could make a help-the-poor political statement? (14.72)
Yep, money is a relative matter. Lauren didn't consider herself rich while living in Robledo, but relative to the street poor, she basically was. Faced with the reality of the poor scavenging the ruins of her home, Lauren questions their purported political motivations. Maybe the pyro addicts thought they were helping the poor by attacking the rich, but Lauren doesn't much believe any of that. Seems like they are only out for themselves.
Quote #10
In some places, the rich are escaping by flying out in helicopters. The bridges that are still intact—and most of them are—are guarded either by the police or by gangs. Both groups are there to rob desperate, fleeing people of their weapons, money, food, and water—at the least. The penalty for being too poor to be worth robbing is a beating, a rape, and/or death. The National Guard has been activated to restore order, and I suppose it might. But I suspect that in the short term, it will only add to the chaos. What else could another group of well-armed people do in such an insane situation. (20.6)
Toward the end of the novel, society is breaking down in more and more places. Almost everybody's becoming impoverished, and those who are not are having to escape from riots in helicopters. This is Lauren's near-future United States. What would you do in this situation, and why? Lauren doesn't trust the National Guard to solve the problem (they're just another group of men with guns), but who can she trust? She turns to herself for answers—is doing that a good idea?