How we cite our quotes: (Record.Paragraph)
Quote #1
You see? Spring! She talks about Spring! Females! (2.6)
The vague sexual references here are mainly presented as an irritation to D-503. Spring is equated with femininity, and femininity with sexuality. "Man, what a drag!" he says… an indication that something is deeply, profoundly wrong with him.
Quote #2
"I would so like to come to you today and lower the blinds. Today, right now …" O shyly lifted her blue-crystal eyes to me. (2.39)
Even in this world devoid of emotion, there is desire, and desire is permissible in certain well-defined situations. That can make sex a powerful means of asserting your own identity.
Quote #3
During these hours you would see the curtains discreetly drawn in the rooms of some. (3.7)
Sex is the only time privacy is allowed, something the State hopes to do away with. Why is that? What is so dangerous and yet so undeniably vital about sex?
Quote #4
Tonight at twenty-one o'clock O- was to come to me; therefore my desire to see her was quite natural. (4.2)
They really kind of suck the romance out of it, don't they?
Quote #5
A Number may obtain a license to use any other Number as a sexual product. (5.4)
Like we said, the lovey-dovey elements of sex kind of get squashed here. But again, it cements the notion that the State has dehumanized its citizens so much that this closest experience and exspression of human love becomes a simple "product."
Quote #6
"She was dressed in a saffron-yellow dress of an ancient style. This was a thousand times worse than if she had not been dressed at all." (10.24)
Here, sexuality becomes a sort of fetish, attached to the ancient dress she's wearing rather than to her. It helps tie the act in with the ancient culture it came from, and by extension the taboo thoughts about individual rights and freedoms.
Quote #7
I looked silently at her lips. All women are lips, all lips. Some are pink and firmly round: a ring, a tender guardrail from the whole world. And then there are these ones: a second ago they weren't here, and just now—like a knife-slit—they are here, still dripping sweet blood. (13.13)
Sexuality is being used as a reduction here: to reduce all women into a single "woman." Even in the throes of his awakening humanity, D-503 still tends to think of things in State-approved terms.
Quote #8
She comes up close, leans on my shoulder, and we are one, she flows into me and I know: this was the necessary part. I know this with every nerve, with every hair, with every sweet and almost painful beat of my heart. And I submitted to this "necessity" with joy. (13.14)
Here, sex becomes a sort of transition, a way of helping ease the shift into a full human soul. He understands that there's pain involved and chooses to go forward anyway.
Quote #9
And hence, if "L" signifies love and "D" signifies death, then L = f(D)—that is, love is a function of death … (24.2)
Love and death are the great themes of Western art, and the sex act has sometimes been compared to dying (in the best possible way). Again, it's a way of connecting the sex act to the larger realities of the universe, and the way the State seeks to both explore those realities and eliminate the ones they find inconvenient.
Quote #10
How can I explain what this ancient, ridiculous, miraculous rite does to me, when her lips touch mine? What formula could express this whirlwind that clears my soul of everything except her? Yes, my soul, yes … laugh if you want to. (27.6)
At least there's one point where his head is clear about life, and its expression in sexuality. Even then, he's a little self-conscious about it: proof that the State never quite leaves his psyche.